Lit Chat

Get the conversation started—at your book club, writer’s group, or any friendly get-together—with these 100 reading-themed questions. Some invoke books that are tied to memories (name your favorite childhood picture book); others prompt you to choose ideal reading material for a hypothetical situation (if you were stranded on a desert island, what book would you want with you?). Some of them aim to get people comparing their favorite (and not-so-favorite) characters or authors, and others engage in popular debates among readers (name a movie adaptation you liked and defend your choice). Created to give readers of all persuasions an excuse to talk about books, ideas, and life itself, this collection from the largest independent community for book lovers in North America is a delight for any bibliophile. Reading is a solitary experience—but being a reader is a shared experience, and that shared experience is what Lit Chat is all about.

A remarkable book that addresses the ways in children respond to literature across a variety of everyday classroom situations. The result is a balanced resource for teachers who want to deepen their understanding of literature and literary engagement.

Contrastive lexical semantics was the main topic of an International Workshop at the University of Münster in May, 1997. It was addressed from different perspectives, from the pragmatic perspective of a corpus-oriented approach as well as from the model-oriented perspective of sign theoretic linguistics. Whereas the rule-governed model-oriented approach is necessarily restricted to subsets of vocabulary, the pragmatic approach aims to analyse and describe the whole vocabulary-in-use. After the pragmatic turn, lexical semantics can no longer be seen as a discipline on its own but has to be developed as an integral part of a theory of language use. Essential features of individual languages can be discovered only by looking beyond the limits of our mother languages and including a contrastive perspective. Within a pragmatic, corpus-oriented approach essential new ideas are discussed, mainly the insight that single words can no longer be considered to be the lexical unit. It is the complex multi-word lexical unit a pragmatic approach has to deal with.

Successful speaking and understanding requires mechanisms for reliably encoding structured linguistic representations in memory and for effectively accessing information in those representations later. Studying the time-course of real-time linguistic dependency formation provides a valuable tool for uncovering the cognitive and neural basis of these mechanisms. This volume draws together multiple perspectives on encoding and navigating structured linguistic representations, to highlight important empirical insights, and to identify key priorities for new research in this area.

Riding on a wave of popular demand for YA fantasy and science fiction, Marissa Meyer’s success in the genre is the latest stage in the steady rise of an up-and-coming author. Meyer’s career milestones are discussed, including her education in creative writing, her work as an editor on other writers’ books, and her writing of the manga comic fan fiction Sailor Moon under a pseudonym. The book provides an in-depth look at the writing process and creative origins behind her first book, Cinder, the first in an ambitious four-part series that reworks traditional fairy tales in a modern context.