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I ACCORDING TO THE SO-CALLED CONSTITUTIVE OUTLOOK on linguistic communication, meaning does not exist prior to communicative interaction but is, rather, constituted through such interaction. (1) Typically, notions from the [...]

Manole explores how an exilic actor's foreign accent can evolve from a barrier to working in mainstage theatre to a site of simultaneously acknowledging and negotiating differences between natives and [...]

A study was conducted to investigate the role of language choice in advertising to bilinguals in global markets. Findings indicate that language formats vary in their advertising effectiveness for different types of products. Results also show that multinational corporations cannot mimic local companies in their choice of advertising language.

When people speak, they often insinuate their intent indirectly rather than stating it as a bald proposition. Examples include sexual come-ons, veiled threats, polite requests, and concealed bribes. We propose a three-part theory of indirect speech, based on the idea that human communication involves a mixture of cooperation and conflict. First, indirect requests allow for plausible deniability, in which a cooperative listener can accept the request, but an uncooperative one cannot react adversarially to it. This intuition is supported by a game-theoretic model that predicts the costs and benefits to a speaker of direct and indirect requests. Second, language has two functions: to convey information and to negotiate the type of relationship holding between speaker and hearer (in particular, dominance, communality, or reciprocity). The emotional costs of a mismatch in the assumed relationship type can create a need for plausible deniability and, thereby, select for indirectness even when there are no tangible costs. Third, people perceive language as a digital medium, which allows a sentence to generate common knowledge, to propagate a message with high fidelity, and to serve as a reference point in coordination games. This feature makes an indirect request qualitatively different from a direct one even when the speaker and listener can infer each other's intentions with high confidence.

The clever use of etymology or the sources of the formation of a word by Socrates to tease his interlocutor Phaedrus, and the development of these as seen in Plato's 'Phaedrus' 266D7-9 is commented upon.

The article explores Heidegger's method of etymology use that demonstrates the range of historical meanings of a word that can resonate richly.

BETWEEN BERLIN AND VIENNA In October 1943, in New York, halfway through her 18-year trajectory as a stateless person but already as a master of idiomatic, polemical English, Hannah Arendt [...]

The aim of this essay is to ask whether what it calls the 'presence' of things, including things of the past, can be rendered in language, including the language of historians. In Part I the essay adumbrates what it means by presence (the spatio-temporally located existence of physical objects and events). It also proposes two ideal types: meaning-cultures (in which the interpretation of meaning is of paramount concern, so much so that the thinghood of things is often obscured), and presence-cultures (in which capturing the tangibility of things is of utmost importance). In the modern period, linguistic utterance has typically come to be used for, and to be interpreted as, the way by which meaning rather than presence is expressed, thereby creating a gap between language and presence. Thus, in Part II the essay explores ways that this gap might be bridged, examining seven instances in which presence can be 'amalgamated' with language. These range from instances in which the physical dimensions of language itself are made manifest, to those through which the physicality of the things to which language refers is supposed to be made evident. Of particular note for theorists of history are those instances in which things can be made present by employing the deictic, poetic, and incantatory potential of linguistic expression. The essay concludes in Part III with a reflection on Heidegger's idea that language is the 'house of Being,' now interpreted as the idea that language can be the medium through which the separation of humans and the (physical) things of their environment may be overcome. The hope of achieving presence in language is no less than a reconciliation of humans with their world, including--and of most interest to historians--the things and events of their past.

Usefulness of online libraries' glossaries is studied with the help of surveys.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] When we get into an argument, sooner or later someone is bound to ask: 'Can you prove it?' This demand seems reasonable, but in practice we may find […]

In 3 experiments, the authors investigated how strategic inclinations associated with promotion versus prevention orientations--that is, eager approach versus vigilant avoidance, respectively--affect the use or language. It is hypothesized that eager promotion strategies, used to attain desired end states entail using more abstract language than used with vigilant prevention strategies. This is shown to hold for experimentally induced relationship goals (Experiment 1) and communication goals (Experiment 2). In the 3rd experiment, the authors examined the impact of abstractly and concretely worded messages upon the behavioral intentions of chronically prevention and promotion-oriented individuals and found support for the hypothesis that behavioral intentions to engage in specific activities are stronger when there is a fit between message wording and chronic orientation than when there is no fit. The broader implications of these findings are discussed. Keywords: linguistic category model, regulatory focus theory, language use

The role, importance and the layers of language used in the workplace of multi national companies are discussed. The need for the language standardization for the control and coordination of the staff members in workplace is addressed.

Sentences such as The road runs through the valley and The mountain range goes frown Canada to Mexico include a motion verb but express no explicit motion or state change. It is argued that these sentences involve fictive motion, an implicit type of motion. But do people trying to understand these sentences mentally simulate motion? This question was addressed in four experiments. In each, participants read a story about travel--for instance, fast versus slow, short versus long distance, and easy versus difficult terrain--and then made a timed decision about a fictive motion sentence. Overall, latencies were shorter 'after they had read about fast travel, short distances, and easy terrains. Critically, the effect did not arise with nonfictive motion target sentences (e.g., The road is in the valley), as was demonstrated in three control studies. The results suggest that the processing of fictive motion includes mental simulation.

Here is a quiz question of a kind that appeals to certain types: which West London pub carries out business under two different names? And what are its Augustan literary [...]

In this paper I examine the justification of proposals to conserve threatened languages, those in danger of dying out from the lack of primary speakers. These proposals presuppose that there is value in the continued existence of languages, and I explore the different kinds of value involved: instrumental, aesthetic, subjective, and cognitive, the last involving the ability of each language to express distinctive thoughts. The attempt to retain the cognitive value of a language underlies proposals to conserve a pool of primary speakers of threatened languages. Analyzing cognitive value in terms of Rolston's systemic value flags a dual problem for conservation proposals: attempts to conserve the cognitive value of a language may be futile and attempts to defeat the factors creating the futility are morally problematic. The other values of language may still justify morally permissible projects to conserve or preserve threatened languages.

Good assessment of environmental issues, such as climate change, requires effective communication of the degree of uncertainty associated with numerous possible outcomes. One strategy that accomplishes this, while responding to people's difficulty understanding numeric probability estimates, is the use of specific language to describe probability ranges. This is the strategy adopted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in their Third Assessment Report. There is a problem with this strategy, however, in that it uses words differently from the way lay readers of the assessment typically do. An experiment conducted with undergraduate science students confirms this. The IPCC strategy could result in miscommunication, leading readers to under-estimate the probability of high-magnitude possible outcomes.

In this essay I will address Maryse Conde's perception and definition of Guadeloupean identity through an analysis of her linguistic and sociolinguistic treatment of Guadeloupean Creole in three of her [...]

The affinities between Joyce's novels and Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel have long been a theme of Joyce criticism, in spite of Joyce's well-known assertion that he had not read Rabelais. [...]

Byline: Pietro Perconti (1) Keywords: animal communication; context-dependence; human language; indexicals Abstract: The aim of this paper is to show that humanlanguage is context-dependent in a veryspecific way. In order to support this thesis,a detailed comparison is made between the waysin which verbal expressions depend on thecontext of occurrence and evaluation and animalcommunication systems. The comparisonhighlights a series of analogies anddifferences between human language and thecommunication systems of other animals. Myproposal is to use the term `indexicality' toindicate the characteristic way of using thecontext in human language and to use the moregeneral phrase `context-dependence' for thecorresponding phenomenon in animalcommunication systems. Author Affiliation: (1) Dipartimento di Scienze cognitive, Universita di Messine, Via Concezione 6--8, Messine, Italia, E-mail Article History: Registration Date: 12/10/2004

When making requests, speakers often pursue not only an influence goal but a secondary goal such as implying that they do not wish to impose. This research asked whether or not the effects of situation features on the importance of secondary goals depend on the kind of request being made. The effects of six features and five interactions on the importance of five secondary goals were observed in four types four types of requests. (borrow, share activity, stop annoyance, request permission). Findings indicate that the effect of situation features on the importance of secondary goals often depends on request type. The implications for cognitive theories of message production, individual differences in adaptive ability, and politeness theory (Brown and Levinson, 1987) are considered.

In its communicative gesture to its listeners, in its movement 'toward something open, inhabitable, an approachable you, perhaps, an approachable reality,' Celan's poetry performs a sanctifying function. Such a function, [...]

P. M. Pexman, S. J. Lupker, and D. Jared (2001) reported longer response latencies in lexical decision tasks (LDTs) for homophones (e.g., maid) than for nonhomophones, and attributed this homophone effect to orthographic competition created by feedback activation from phonology. In the current study, two predictions of this feedback account were tested: (a) In LDT, observe homophone effects should be observed but not regularity or homograph effects because most exception words (e.g., pint) and homographs (e.g., wind) have different feedback characteristics than homophones do, and (b) in a phonological LDT ('does it sound like a word?'), regularity and homograph effects should be observed but not homophone effects. Both predictions were confirmed. These results support the claim that feedback activation from phonology plays a significant role in visual word recognition.

How word production unfolds remains controversial. Serial models posit that phonological encoding begins only after lexical node selection, whereas cascade models hold that it can occur before selection. Both models were evaluated by testing whether unselected lexical nodes influence phonological encoding in the picture-picture interference paradigm. English speakers were shown pairs of superimposed pictures and were instructed to name one picture and ignore another. Naming was faster when target pictures were paired with phonologically related (bed-bell) than with unrelated (bed-pin) distractors. This suggests that the unspoken distractors exerted a phonological influence on production. This finding is inconsistent with serial models but in line with cascade ones. The facilitation effect was not replicated in Italian with the same pictures, supporting the view that the effect found in English was caused by the phonological properties of the stimuli.

During on-line language production, speakers rapidly select a sequence of words to express their desired meaning. The current study examines whether this lexical selection is also dependent on the existing activation of surface properties of the words. Such surface properties clearly matter in various forms of wordplay, including poetry and musical lyrics. The experiments in this article explore whether language processing more generally is sensitive to these properties. Two experiments examined the interaction between phonological and semantic features for written and verbal productions. In Experiment 1, participants were given printed sentences with a missing word, and were asked to generate reasonable completions. The completions reflected both the semantic and the surface features of the preceding context. In Experiment 2, listeners heard sentence contexts, and were asked to rapidly produce a word to complete the utterance. These spontaneous completions again incorporated surface features activated by the context. The results suggest that lexical access in naturalistic language processing is influenced by an interaction between the surface and semantic features of language.

Significance of good student self-assessment in understanding of chemical concepts is discussed. For moving beyond rote memorization, developing ability to evaluate work of one's own and of others is necessary. A series of pretests are administered in the first semester of the general chemistry course at Rice University. As part of this series, a new interactive question type gives opportunity to look at ability to self-assess and at its relationship to success on content questions. The languages of chemistry must be learned as part of any chemistry program that succeeds. Students must examine work and find their own errors if they are to learn. Active learning and cooperative learning are important.