Product Description: The 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease epidemic in the UK, during which millions of animals were culled over a nine-month period, had a devastating and long-lasting impact on individuals and communities. In 2002 the European Parliament noted that policymakers need to have a better understanding of the social and psychological impact of such events on adults and children, on farmers and non-farmers...read more

Product Description: Is shopping for food really a political act?Why is it that, in a world with enough food for everyone, more people than ever go hungry?Why did the French resistance against genetically modified foods become a fight against McDonalds?Why did the foot-and-mouth epidemic in the UK become a problem for consumers?Capable of connecting human bodies to abstract nations, and techno-science to moral concerns, food has become one of the most contested fields of our time...read more

Product Description: About fifty years ago, Stephen Ullmann wrote that polysemy is 'the pivot of semantic analysis'. Fifty years on, polysemy has become one of the hottest topics in linguistics and in the cognitive sciences at large. The book deals with the topic froma wide variety of viewpoints...read more

The aim of this book is to provide a fresh view of the history of nineteenth-century language study by focusing on the writings of three linguists (Whitney, Bréal and Wegener) in three countries (the United States, France and Germany). The standard histories of linguistics portray the period between the 1840s and the 1890s as comprising a steady increase in philological knowledge, the discovery of sound laws and the astute study of minute philological curiosities. The three writers discussed here illustrate another trend in the evolution of the science of language. They are witnesses to an increasing interest on questions of 'general' linguistics, semantics and the study of human communication - new points of view from which they study the origin of language, language change and linguistic creativity. The life and work of these three outstanding scholars, their relationships with their friends and enemies and their efforts to free linguistics from the unreflecting use of biological metaphors, give a new insight into the evolution of language study in an interdisciplinary and international context.

The roots of pragmatics reach back to Antiquity, especially to rhetoric as one of the three liberal arts. However, until the end of the 18th century proto-pragmatic insights tended to be consigned to the pragmatic, that is rhetoric, wastepaper basket and thus excluded from serious philosophical consideration.It can be said that pragmatics was conceived between 1780 and 1830 in Britain, but also in Germany and in France in post-Lockian and post-Kantian philosophies of language. These early ‘conceptions’ of pragmatics are described in the first part of the book.The second part of the book looks at pragmatic insights made between 1830 and 1880, when they were once more relegated to the philosophical and linguistic underground. The main stage was then occupied by a fact-hunting historical comparative linguistics on the one hand and a newly spiritualised philosophy on the other.In the last part the period between 1880 and 1930 is presented, when pragmatic insights flourished and were sought after systematically. This was due in part to a new upsurge in empiricism, positivism and later behaviourism in philosophy, linguistics and psychology. Between 1780 and 1930 philosophers, psychologists, sociologists and linguists came to see that language could only be studied in the context of dialogue, in the context of human life and finally as being a kind of human action itself.

Product Description: It is widely believed by historians of linguistics that the 19th-century was largely devoted to historical and comparative studies, with the main emphasis on the discovery of soundlaws. Syntax is typically portrayed as a mere sideline of these studies, while semantics is seldom even mentioned...read more