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Author: Lee M. Pierce Publisher: University of Alabama Press ISBN: 0817360875 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 182
Book Description
How the syntax used in US political discourse creates the very crises it describes American public culture is obsessed with crisis. Political polarization, economic collapse, moral decline—the worst seems always yet to come and already here. Tense Times argues that the ways we discuss these crises, especially through verb tenses, not only contribute to our perception and description of such crises but create them. Past. Present. Future. These are the three principal verb tenses—the category of syntax that allows us to discuss time—that account for much of what is written about our crisis culture. Lee M. Pierce invites readers to expand their syntactic inventory beyond tense to include aspect (duration) and mood (attitude). Doing so opens new possibilities for understanding crisis discourse, as Pierce demonstrates with close readings of three syntaxes: the historical present, the past imperfective, and the retroactive subjunctive. Each mode produces a different experience of crisis and can help us understand our current political reality. The book investigates a dozen widely circulated discourses from the past decade of US political culture, from Beyoncé’s controversial hit single “Formation” to the presidential campaign slogans of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, from the dueling rallies of Glenn Beck and Jon Stewart at the National Mall to the Ground Zero Mosque controversy and the 2007–2008 bailout. Taking a comparative approach that integrates theories of syntax from rhetorical, literary, affect, and cultural studies as well as linguistics, computer science, and Black studies, Tense Times suggests that the public’s conjuring of crisis is not inherently problematic. Rather, it is the openness of that crisis to contingency—the possibility that things could have been otherwise—that ought to concern anyone interested in language, politics, American culture, current events, or the direction this country is headed.
Author: Lee M. Pierce Publisher: University of Alabama Press ISBN: 0817360875 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 182
Book Description
How the syntax used in US political discourse creates the very crises it describes American public culture is obsessed with crisis. Political polarization, economic collapse, moral decline—the worst seems always yet to come and already here. Tense Times argues that the ways we discuss these crises, especially through verb tenses, not only contribute to our perception and description of such crises but create them. Past. Present. Future. These are the three principal verb tenses—the category of syntax that allows us to discuss time—that account for much of what is written about our crisis culture. Lee M. Pierce invites readers to expand their syntactic inventory beyond tense to include aspect (duration) and mood (attitude). Doing so opens new possibilities for understanding crisis discourse, as Pierce demonstrates with close readings of three syntaxes: the historical present, the past imperfective, and the retroactive subjunctive. Each mode produces a different experience of crisis and can help us understand our current political reality. The book investigates a dozen widely circulated discourses from the past decade of US political culture, from Beyoncé’s controversial hit single “Formation” to the presidential campaign slogans of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, from the dueling rallies of Glenn Beck and Jon Stewart at the National Mall to the Ground Zero Mosque controversy and the 2007–2008 bailout. Taking a comparative approach that integrates theories of syntax from rhetorical, literary, affect, and cultural studies as well as linguistics, computer science, and Black studies, Tense Times suggests that the public’s conjuring of crisis is not inherently problematic. Rather, it is the openness of that crisis to contingency—the possibility that things could have been otherwise—that ought to concern anyone interested in language, politics, American culture, current events, or the direction this country is headed.
Author: Aleksandar Jokic Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262263246 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 481
Book Description
Among the many branches of philosophy, the philosophy of time and the philosophy of language are more intimately interconnected than most, yet their practitioners have long pursued independent paths. This book helps to bridge the gap between the two groups. As it makes clear, it is increasingly difficult to do philosophy of language without any metaphysical commitments as to the nature of time, and it is equally difficult to resolve the metaphysical question of whether time is tensed or tenseless independently of the philosophy of language. Indeed, one is tempted to see philosophy of language and metaphysics as a continuum with no sharp boundary. The essays, which were written expressly for this book by leading philosophers of language and philosophers of time, discuss the philosophy of language and its implications for the philosophy of time and vice versa. The intention is not only to further dialogue between philosophers of language and of time but also to present new theories to advance the state of knowledge in the two fields. The essays are organized in two sections—one on the philosophy of tensed language, the other on the metaphysics of time.
Author: Norbert Hornstein Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 9780262581295 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 260
Book Description
How do humans acquire, at a very early age and from fragmentary and haphazard data, the complex patterns of their native language? This is the logical problem of language acquisition, and it is the question that directs the search for an innate universal grammar. As Time Goes By extends the search by proposing a theory of natural-language tense that will be responsive to the problem of language acquisition. The clearly written discussion proceeds step-by-step from simple observations and principles to far-reaching conclusions involving complex data carefully selected and persuasively presented. Throughout, Hornstein focuses on the logical problem of language acquisition, highlighting the importance of explanatory adequacy and the role of syntactic representations in determining intricate properties of semantic interpretation.
Author: Robin Le Poidevin Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 9780198236955 Category : Metaphysics Languages : en Pages : 314
Book Description
These essays broaden the debate on the nature of time. They provide an outline to the debate, presenting rival theories which demonstrate that such questions are intimately connected with issues in other fields of philosophy.
Author: Publisher: Walter de Gruyter ISBN: 3110199882 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 846
Book Description
The Grammar of the English Tense System forms the first volume of a four-volume set, The Grammar of the English Verb Phrase. The other volumes, to appear over the next few years, will deal with mood and modality, aspect and voice. The book aims to provide a grammar of tense which can be used both as an advanced reference grammar (for example by MA-level or postgraduate students of English or linguistics) and as a scientific study which can act as a basis for and stimulus to further research. It provides not only a wealth of data but also a unique framework for the study of the English tense system, which achieves great predictive and explanatory power on the basis of a limited number of relatively simple rules. The framework provided allows for an analysis of the semantics of individual tenses which reflects the role of tenses not only in locating situations in time relative to speech time but also in relating situations in time relative to one another to form temporally coherent discourse. Attention is paid to the relations between tenses. On the one hand, we can identify sets of tenses linked to particular temporal areas such as the past or the future. These sets of tenses provide for the expression of a system of temporal relations in a stretch of discourse in which all the situations are located within the same temporal area. On the other hand, there are many contexts in which speakers might in theory choose between two or more tenses to locate a situation (e.g., when we choose between the past tense and the present perfect to locate a situation before speech time), and the book examines the difference that a choice of one or the other tense may make within a discourse context. The book moves from a detailed exploration of the meaning and use of individual tenses to a thorough analysis of the way in which tenses can be seen to function together as sets, and finally to a detailed examination of tenses in, and tenses interacting with, temporal adverbials. Original data is used frequently throughout the book to illustrate the theory discussed.
Author: Alfred Schopf Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG ISBN: 3111358364 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 236
Book Description
Over the past few decades, the book series Linguistische Arbeiten [Linguistic Studies], comprising over 500 volumes, has made a significant contribution to the development of linguistic theory both in Germany and internationally. The series will continue to deliver new impulses for research and maintain the central insight of linguistics that progress can only be made in acquiring new knowledge about human languages both synchronically and diachronically by closely combining empirical and theoretical analyses. To this end, we invite submission of high-quality linguistic studies from all the central areas of general linguistics and the linguistics of individual languages which address topical questions, discuss new data and advance the development of linguistic theory.
Author: Christian Rohrer Publisher: Walter de Gruyter ISBN: 3111346064 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 433
Book Description
Over the past few decades, the book series Linguistische Arbeiten [Linguistic Studies], comprising over 500 volumes, has made a significant contribution to the development of linguistic theory both in Germany and internationally. The series will continue to deliver new impulses for research and maintain the central insight of linguistics that progress can only be made in acquiring new knowledge about human languages both synchronically and diachronically by closely combining empirical and theoretical analyses. To this end, we invite submission of high-quality linguistic studies from all the central areas of general linguistics and the linguistics of individual languages which address topical questions, discuss new data and advance the development of linguistic theory.
Author: Jan Chovanec Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company ISBN: 9027269327 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 294
Book Description
This book provides the first comprehensive account of temporal deixis in English printed and online news texts. Linking the characteristic usage of tenses with the projection of deictic centres, it notes how conventional tenses, particularly in headlines, are affected by heteroglossia arising from various accessed voices. The resulting tense shifts are interpreted pragmatically as a conventional reader-oriented strategy that creates the impression of temporal co-presence. It is argued that since different tense choices systematically correlate with the three main textual segments of news texts, the function of tense needs to be viewed in a close connection with its local context. Traditional news texts are also contrasted with online news, particularly as far as the effect of hypertextuality on the coding of time is concerned. A two-level structural framework for the analysis of online news is proposed in order to account for their increased textual complexity. The book will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and students working in the fields of media pragmatics, discourse analysis and stylistics.
Author: Michael Tooley Publisher: Clarendon Press ISBN: 0191518980 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 420
Book Description
Michael Tooley presents a major new philosophical study of time and its relation to causation. The nature of time has always been one of the most fascinating and perplexing problems of philosophy. In recent years it has become the focus of vigorous debate between advocates of rival theories, as traditional, 'tensed' accounts of time, which hold that time has a direction and that the flow of time is part of the nature of the universe, have been challenged by 'tenseless' accounts of time, according to which past, present, and future are merely subjective features of experience, rather than objective features of events. Time, Tense, and Causation offers a new approach, in many ways intermediate between these two rivals. Tooley shares with tensed approaches the view that the universe is dynamic, holding that the past and the present are real while the future is not; but he rejects the view that this entails that there are irreducible tensed facts. Tooley's approach accounts for time in terms of its relation to causation: he argues that the direction of time is based upon the direction of causation, and that the key to understanding the dynamic nature of the universe is to understand the nature of causation. He also offers analyses of tensed concepts, and discusses semantic issues concerning truth and time. Finally, addressing the formidable difficulties posed for tensed accounts of time by the Special Theory of Relativity, he suggests that a modified version of the theory, compatible with the account of time in this book, is to be preferred to the standard version. Time, Tense, and Causation is rich in sophisticated and stimulating discussions of many of the deepest problems of metaphysics.
Author: Lee M. Pierce
Author: Lee M. Pierce
Author: Aleksandar Jokic
Author: Norbert Hornstein
Author: Robin Le Poidevin
Author: Constance Pessels
Author: 
Author: Alfred Schopf
Author: Christian Rohrer
Author: Jan Chovanec
Author: Michael Tooley