Thinking Syntactically

Thinking Syntactically: A Guide to Argumentation and Analysis is a textbook designed to teach introductory students the skills of relating data to theory and theory to data. Helps students develop their thinking and argumentation skills rather than merely introducing them to one particular version of syntactic theory. Structured around a wide range of exercises that use clear and compelling logic to build arguments and lead up to theoretical proposals. Data drawn from current media sources, including newspapers, books, and television programs, to help students formulate and test hypotheses. Generative in spirit, but does not focus on specific theoretical approaches but enables students to understand and evaluate different approaches more easily. Written by an established author with an international reputation.

Thinking Syntactically: A Guide to Argumentation and Analysis is a textbook designed to teach introductory students the skills of relating data to theory and theory to data. Helps students develop their thinking and argumentation skills rather than merely introducing them to one particular version of syntactic theory. Structured around a wide range of exercises that use clear and compelling logic to build arguments and lead up to theoretical proposals. Data drawn from current media sources, including newspapers, books, and television programs, to help students formulate and test hypotheses. Ge.

What Theodor W. Adorno says cannot be separated from how he says it. By the same token, what he thinks cannot be isolated from how he thinks it. The central aim of Richter’s book is to examine how these basic yet far-reaching assumptions teach us to think with Adorno—both alongside him and in relation to his diverse contexts and constellations. These contexts and constellations range from aesthetic theory to political critique, from the problem of judgment to the difficulty of inheriting a tradition, from the primacy of the object to the question of how to lead a right life within a wrong one. Richter vividly shows how Adorno’s highly suggestive—yet often overlooked—concept of the “uncoercive gaze” designates a specific kind of comportment in relation to an object of critical analysis: It moves close to the object and tarries with it while struggling to decipher the singularities and non-identities that are lodged within it, whether the object is an idea, a thought, a concept, a text, a work of art, an experience, or a problem of political or sociological theory. Thinking with Adorno’s uncoercive gaze not only means following the fascinating paths of his own work; it also means extending hospitality to the ghostly voices of others. As this book shows, Adorno is best understood as a thinker in dialogue, whether with long-deceased predecessors in the German tradition such as Kant and Hegel, with writers such as Kafka, with contemporaries such as Benjamin and Arendt, or with philosophical voices that succeeded him, such as those of Derrida and Agamben.

This volume contains original research and innovative analyses that deepen our understanding of figurative thought and language. The selected papers focus on the multi-faceted aspect of figuration, its function in thought, and its impact on areas of grammar and communication. Key topics explored include metaphor, metonymy and their relationship to each other, as well as the less studied figure of hyperbole and its relation to the fundamental figures of metaphor and metonymy. Collectively, the papers examine the pragmatic reasoning processes triggered by figurative thought, the lexicogrammatical motivations and/or constraints on figurative language, the impact of deeply entrenched figurative thought on the lexicon of natural languages, the cultural origins of figurative thought, and the psycholinguistic motivations for figuration. The comprehensive treatment of these issues is fundamental for future research on figurative thought and language, particularly on questions of universality vs. specificity of figuration, the impact of figuration on constructions, cross-linguistic comparisons of figurative language, and cognitive-pragmatic approaches to figurative meaning.

Pollock describes an exciting theory of rationality and its partial implementation in OSCAR, a computer system whose descendants will literally be persons.

The universe is a vast thought, a cosmic process of thinking, a living organism seeking to know itself. It thinks about itself all the time, and what it wants to know is exactly what it is. The task of the universal thought is to become conscious of itself, to become entirely self-aware, to attain Absolute Knowledge of itself. The secret of thought is that it is the purest and clearest energy of all - light energy. Your mind is an immaterial electromagnetic system outside space and time. When all of us become "enlightened", the resultant state of the universe is the "God State" of perfect light, perfect reason, perfect knowledge, perfect understanding, perfect symmetry, perfect consciousness, and perfect bliss. God is in his heaven and all is right with the universe. This is the State that awaits us all, and which some humans - the enlightened ones - are actually bringing about right now. Don't you want to be one of the Illuminated Ones?

Inventing Agency addresses some of the most central and pressing concerns in criticism, theory, and philosophy today. As new metaphysics of the realia of power and independently animated objects have replaced ancient conceptualizations of substance, being, and causation, the question of the “subject”-of the capability for just such conceptual change, for acting to any effect whatsoever-has reemerged with fresh critical urgency. Writing on theories and fictions of the subject from Aristotle to Althusser and Fielding to Flaubert, the contributors to Inventing Agency explore the unprecedented productions of the subject as agent-of cognition, aesthetic experience and judgment, imagination and representation, and moral and political action-that together define the “revolution” in reflection that Kant called “the Age of Critique.” Informed by expertise in such interrelated fields as continental and analytic philosophy and literary history, Marxian and utopian theory, poetics and cultural criticism, moral theory and theory of sensibility, and feminist and disability studies, Inventing Agency addresses the invention of subjecthood by philosophical and literary conceptions of the specifically human capacities that continue to reveal the prospect of social-individual and historical-agency in action. This collection on the productions of the subject is vital reading for anyone engaged in thinking about where the categories of contemporary theory come from, and where they might lead next.

This book discusses the morphological properties of intonation, building on past research to support the long-recognized relationship between the functions and meanings of discourse particles and the functions and meanings of intonation. The morphological status of intonation has been debated for decades, and this book provides evidence from the literature combined with new and compelling empirical evidence to show that specific intonational forms correspond to specific segmental discourse particles. Based on the conclusion that intonation is in the lexicon, it proposes syntactic positions for intonational meanings using a cartographic approach. It also describes how intonation is represented in speakers' minds, which has important implications for first and second language acquisition as well as for theories and approaches to artificial speech recognition and production. This book is of interest to theoretical and applied linguists, as well as to anyone whose research and interests relate in any way to intonation.