Explains the principles which underlie the structure and appropriate use of sentence in a language.

This volume is a collection of articles which present the results of investigations into the grammar, semantics and pragmatics of deictic expressions in several languages. Special emphasis is placed on contrastive studies that take cognitive and cultural context into account. Both the empirical and theoretical studies focus on the ways in which spatial, temporal, personal and textual entities are conceptualised and referred to. The cognitive approach proves to be a promising perspective combining aspects of perception, reasoning and linguistic expression to reveal what seems to be at the very heart of deictics.

This book engages with deictics ('pointing' words like here/there, this/that) of space. It focuses on texts by Donne, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Wroth in particular, relating their forms of deixis to cultural and generic developments; but it also suggests parallels with both iconic and neglected texts from a range of later historical periods.

Deixis as a field of research has generated increased interest in recent years. It is crucial for a number of different subdisciplines: pragmatics, semantics, cognitive and contrastive linguistics, to name just a few. The subject is of particular interest to experts and students, philosophers, teachers, philologists, and psychologists interested in the study of their language or in comparing linguistic structures. The different deictic structures – not only the items themselves, but also the oppositions between them – reflect the fact that neither the notions of space, time, person nor our use of them are identical cross-culturally. This diversity is not restricted to the difference between languages, but also appears among related dialects and language varieties. This volume will provide an overview of the field, focusing on Romance languages, but also reaching beyond this perspective. Chapters on diachronic developments (language change), comparisons with other (non-)European languages, and on interfaces with neighboring fields of interest are also included. The editors and authors hope that readers, regardless of their familiarity with Romance languages, will gain new insights into deixis in general, and into the similarities and differences among deictic structures used in the languages of the world.

This volume reflects the influence of Chuck Fillmore’s ground-breaking work in the fields of semantics and pragmatics. The papers in the volume pay tribute to his pioneering research into the deepest realms of the nature of ‘meaning’.

The first handbook to survey and expand the burgeoning field of corpus pragmatics, the intersection of pragmatics and corpus linguistics.

The definitive guide to demonstratives, which play a key role in language acquisition and use.