The phrase ‘the meaning of life’ for many seems a quaint notion fit for satirical mauling by Monty Python or Douglas Adams. But in this spirited, stimulating, and quirky enquiry, famed critic Terry Eagleton takes a serious if often amusing look at the question and offers his own surprising answer.
As wars go, the battle between Britain and Argentina for supremacy in the Falklands Islands was little more than a skirmish. Yet few wars have been asked to bear such a heavy and polarized burden of meaning. In this book, David Monaghan employs literary critical methods in developing a comprehensive analysis of the political speeches and journalism through which the Thatcherite myth of British greatness reborn in the Falklands along neo-conservative lines was communicated. He then assesses some of the many dissident films, plays, travel books, and cartoon strips which, in the years since 1982, have used the Falklands War as the basis for national metaphors.
DO YOU WANT A DIRECT EXPERIENCE OF HIGHER STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS? Mystics, philosophers, religious teachers and shaman throughout time tell us the third eye is the gateway to our higher self and deeper life meaning. This unusual book de-mystifies the third eye and explains its true nature in the brain as the pineal gland. Major research studies say at least 85% of us are capable of exciting higher self and 3rd eye experiences. Contains 15 proven-effective step-by-step methods to activate your pineal gland and open your third eye.
Historical Discourse analyses the importance of the language of time, cause and evaluation in both texts which students at secondary school are required to read, and their own writing for assessment. In contrast to studies which have denied that history has a specialised language, Caroline Coffin demonstrates through a detailed study of historical texts, that writing about the past requires different genres, lexical and grammatical structures. In this analysis, language emerges as a powerful tool for making meaning in historical writing.
The consistent interplay between theoretical and applied pursuits has always been a defining feature of systemic functional theory … This kind of mutual enrichment is clearly demonstrated in Alice Caffarel’s work. The result is a description which penetrates to the heart of the language, revealing it at one and the same time as a specimen of the human semiotic and a unique resource for the continuous creation of meaning.’. Professor M A K Halliday, from the Preface.
This book presents a unique range of interdisciplinary work on questions of language development and evolution.It makes visible the significant contribution which meaning-oriented linguistics is making to debates about the origins of language – from the perspective of language evolution in the species as well as language development in the child. As well as linguistics in the systemic functional, or Hallidayan, tradition, the book offers contributions from primatology, psychiatry, sociology and education.
This is an engaging study of the mental lexicon: the way in which the form and meaning of words is stored by speakers of specific languages. Fortescue attempts to narrow the gap between the results of experimental neurology and the concerns of theoretical linguistics in the area of lexical semantics. The prime goal as regards linguistic theory is to show how matters of lexical organization can be analysed and discussed within a neurologically informed framework that is both adaptable and constrained.
At last — a comprehensive account of the ideas of Benjamin Lee Whorf which not only explains the nature and logic of the linguistic relativity principle but also situates it within a larger ‘theory complex’ delineated in fascinating detail. Whorf’s almost unknown unpublished writings (as well as his published papers) are drawn on to show how twelve elements of theory interweave in a sophisticated account of relations between language, mind, and experience. The role of language in cognition is revealed as a central concern, some of his insights having interesting affinity with modern connectionism. Whorf’s gestaltic ‘isolates’ of experience and meaning, crucial to understanding his reasoning about linguistic relativity, are explained. A little known report written for the Yale anthropology department is used extensively and published for the first time as an appendix. With the Whorf centenary in 1997, this book provides a timely challenge to those who take pleasure in debunking his ideas without bothering to explore their subtlety or even reading them in their original form.
‘Environmental skepticism’ describes the viewpoint that major environmental problems are either unreal or unimportant. This is the first book to analyze the importance of the anti-environmental counter-movement in world politics and its meaning for democratic and accountable deliberation, as well as its importance as a mal-adaptive project that hinders the world’s people to rise to the challenges of sustainability.
Context and the Attitudes collects thirteen seminal essays by Mark Richard on semantics and propositional attitudes. These essays develop a nuanced account of the semantics and pragmatics of our talk about such attitudes, an account on which in saying what someone thinks, we offer our words as a ‘translation’ or representation of the way the target of our talk represents the world. A broad range of topics in philosophical semantics and the philosophy of mind are discussed in detail, including: contextual sensitivity; pretense and semantics; negative existentials; fictional discourse; the nature of quantification; the role of Fregean sense in semantics; ‘direct reference’ semantics; de re belief and the contingent a priori; belief de se; intensional transitives; the cognitive role of tense; and the prospects for giving a semantics for the attitudes without recourse to properties or possible worlds. Richard’s extensive, newly written introduction gives an overview of the essays. The introduction also discusses attitudes realized by dispositions and other non-linguistic cognitive structures, as well as the debate between those who think that mental and linguistic content is structured like the sentences that express it, and those who see content as essentially unstructured.
First book to examine constitutional rights to property in Commonwealth countries. It concentrates on the central issues of a right to property, such as the meaning of ‘property’, and ‘adequate’ or ‘fair’ compensation. Many judges use comparative law to resolve constitutional cases. However, very few books have been written on comparative law in the Commonwealth. It also examines the historical background in the fundamental principles of the British constitution and the colonial system. The analysis is both practical and theoretical, and it will be useful to academic and practising lawyers.
Theories of Lexical Semantics offers a comprehensive overview of the major traditions of word meaning research in linguistics. In spite of the growing importance of the lexicon in linguistic theory, no overview of the main theoretical trends in lexical semantics is currently available. This book fills that gap by charting the evolution of the discipline from the mid nineteenth century to the present day. It presents the main ideas, the landmark publications, and thedominant figures of five traditions: historical-philological semantics, structuralist semantics, generativist semantics, neostructuralist semantics, and cognitive semantics. The theoretical and methodological relationship between the approaches is a major point of attention throughout the text: going well beyond amere chronological enumeration, the book does not only describe the theoretical currents of lexical semantics, but also the undercurrents that have shaped its evolution.
