Edinburgh Textbooks on the English Language - Advanced – serie

How do texts create meaning? How do we arrive at our textual interpretations? Why do we become ‘lost in a book’ or feel deep emotion in response to a literary character? Through close attention to the way texts are written and the language they use, as well as what we know about the human mind, Contemporary Stylistics: Language, Interpretation, Cognition provides readers with the tools to begin answering these questions. In doing so, it introduces the theoretical principles and practical frameworks of stylistics and cognitive poetics, supplying the practical skills to analyse your own responses to literary texts. Including innovative activities for students and with case studies of work by writers like Dylan Thomas, EL James and Kazuo Ishiguro, this is a detailed analysis of contemporary stylistics that offers both historical contextualization of the discipline and points towards its possible future direction.Key Features:Introduces the key terms for each contemporary stylistic frameworkOutlines the foundations of the discipline and addresses cutting-edge developments such as reader response research, corpus methods, multimodality and reader emotion Contains practical analyses, innovative exercises for students, and further reading suggestions in each chapterAddresses the recent attention to multimodal and digital literature and research into empiricism and emotionEach topic is explored through original analyses of a wide range of texts, including poetry, prose, dialogue, song lyrics, political discourse, and linguistic transcripts

How do texts create meaning? How do we arrive at our textual interpretations? Why do we become ‘lost in a book’ or feel deep emotion in response to a literary character? Through close attention to the way texts are written and the language they use, as well as what we know about the human mind, Contemporary Stylistics: Language, Interpretation, Cognition provides readers with the tools to begin answering these questions. In doing so, it introduces the theoretical principles and practical frameworks of stylistics and cognitive poetics, supplying the practical skills to analyse your own responses to literary texts. Including innovative activities for students and with case studies of work by writers like Dylan Thomas, EL James and Kazuo Ishiguro, this is a detailed analysis of contemporary stylistics that offers both historical contextualization of the discipline and points towards its possible future direction.Key Features:Introduces the key terms for each contemporary stylistic frameworkOutlines the foundations of the discipline and addresses cutting-edge developments such as reader response research, corpus methods, multimodality and reader emotion Contains practical analyses, innovative exercises for students, and further reading suggestions in each chapterAddresses the recent attention to multimodal and digital literature and research into empiricism and emotionEach topic is explored through original analyses of a wide range of texts, including poetry, prose, dialogue, song lyrics, political discourse, and linguistic transcripts

The third edition of this successful text provides an ideal introduction for university students of English at the intermediate level. Students planning papers, dissertations or theses will find the book a particularly valuable guide.After introducing corpora and the rationale and basic methodology of corpus linguistics, the authors present a number of recent case studies providing new insights into vocabulary, collocations, phraseology, metaphor and metonymy, syntactic structures, gender and language, and language change. In a final chapter it is shown how the web and social media can be used as a source for linguistic investigations as well as including a section on creating your own corpus. Each chapter includes new study questions, exercises and updated suggestions for further reading. Readers also benefit from an accompanying web-page with exercises and updated information about freely accessible corpora.

The third edition of this successful text provides an ideal introduction for university students of English at the intermediate level. Students planning papers, dissertations or theses will find the book a particularly valuable guide.After introducing corpora and the rationale and basic methodology of corpus linguistics, the authors present a number of recent case studies providing new insights into vocabulary, collocations, phraseology, metaphor and metonymy, syntactic structures, gender and language, and language change. In a final chapter it is shown how the web and social media can be used as a source for linguistic investigations as well as including a section on creating your own corpus. Each chapter includes new study questions, exercises and updated suggestions for further reading. Readers also benefit from an accompanying web-page with exercises and updated information about freely accessible corpora.

What do speakers of English know in order to produce utterances that other speakers will understand? Construction Grammar explains how knowledge of language is organized in speakers'' minds. The central and radical claim of Construction Grammar is that linguistic knowledge can be fully described as knowledge of constructions, which are defined as symbolic units that connect a linguistic form with meaning. The implications of this claim are far-reaching: in Construction Grammar, not only lexical items, but also syntactic patterns are seen as symbolic, meaningful units. Instead of being meaningless structural templates, syntactic patterns actively contribute to the overall meaning of an utterance. Knowledge of language is thought of as a vast repository of interrelated symbolic units, and nothing else in addition. This book expands on this idea and familiarizes readers with the central concepts of Construction Grammar, as applied to English constructions. In the process, it explains how the theory of Construction Grammar relates to issues of language processing, language acquisition, and language variation and change.