This handbook reviews efforts to increase the use of empirical methods in studies of the aesthetic and social effects of literary reading. The reviewed research is expansive, including extension of familiar theoretical models to novel domains (e.g., educational settings); enlarging empirical efforts within under-represented research areas (e.g., child development); and broadening the range of applicable quantitative and qualitative methods (e.g., computational stylistics; phenomenological methods). Especially challenging is articulation of the subtle aesthetic and social effects of literary artefacts (e.g., poetry, film). Increasingly, the complexity of these effects is addressed in multi-variate studies, including confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling. While each chapter touches upon the historical background of a specific research topic, two chapters address the area’s historical background and guiding philosophical assumptions. Taken together, the material in this volume provides a systematic introduction to the area for early career professionals, while challenging active researchers to develop theoretical frameworks and empirical procedures that match the complexity of their research objectives.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language, PROPOR 2020, held in Evora, Portugal, in March 2020. The 36 full papers presented together with 5 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 70 submissions. They are grouped in topical sections on speech processing; resources and evaluation; natural language processing applications; semantics; natural language processing tasks; and multilinguality.

Bringing together scholars from a broad range of theoretical perspectives, The Language of Argumentation offers a unique overview of research at the crossroads of linguistics and theories of argumentation. In addition to theoretical and methodological reflections by leading scholars in their fields, the book contains studies of the relationship between language and argumentation from two different viewpoints. While some chapters take a specific argumentative move as their point of departure and investigate the ways in which it is linguistically manifested in discourse, other chapters start off from a linguistic construction, trying to determine its argumentative function and rhetorical potential. The Language of Argumentation documents the currently prominent research on stylistic aspects of argumentation and illustrates how the study of argumentation benefits from insights from linguistic models, ranging from theoretical pragmatics, politeness theory and metaphor studies to models of discourse coherence and construction grammar.

This book contains selected papers from the 9th International Conference on Information Science and Applications (ICISA 2018) and provides a snapshot of the latest issues encountered in technical convergence and convergences of security technology. It explores how information science is core to most current research, industrial and commercial activities and consists of contributions covering topics including Ubiquitous Computing, Networks and Information Systems, Multimedia and Visualization, Middleware and Operating Systems, Security and Privacy, Data Mining and Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering, and Web Technology. The proceedings introduce the most recent information technology and ideas, applications and problems related to technology convergence, illustrated through case studies, and reviews converging existing security techniques. Through this volume, readers will gain an understanding of the current state-of-the-art information strategies and technologies of convergence security. The intended readership includes researchers in academia, industry and other research institutes focusing on information science and technology.

The objective of this book is to understand variation in political metaphor. Political metaphors are distinctive and important because they are used to achieve political goals: to persuade, to shape expectations, to realize specific objectives and actions. The analyses in the book go beyond the mere identification of conceptual metaphors in discourse to show how political metaphors function in the real world. It starts from the finding that the same conceptual domains are used to characterize politics, political entities and political issues. Yet, the specific metaphors used to describe these conceptual domains often change. This book explores some of the reasons for this variation, including features of political leaders (e.g., their age and gender), countries, and other sociopolitical circumstances. This perspective yields a better understanding of the role(s) of metaphors in political discourse.