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Most of us never realise how many words and expressions used in everyday English have a nautical origin. This fascinating and charming pocket book explains the seafaring beginnings of over 200 such phrases - colourful, bizarre and surprising - and how they came ashore. Just a few examples are: Chock-a-block Chance your arm Money for old rope Spic and span Push the boat out At close quartersThis entertaining book has been a popular title for boaters and landlubbers alike, ever since first public...

This short book, geared towards undergraduate students of computer science and mathematics, is specifically designed for a first course in mathematical logic. A proof of Gödel's completeness theorem and its main consequences is given using Robinson's completeness theorem and Gödel's compactness theorem for propositional logic. The reader will familiarize himself with many basic ideas and artifacts of mathematical logic: a non-ambiguous syntax, logical equivalence and consequence relation, the D...

Allusions form a colourful extension to the English language, drawing on our collective knowledge of literature, mythology, and the Bible to give us a literary shorthand for describing people, places, and events. So a miser is a Scrooge, a strong man is a Samson or a Hercules, a beautiful woman is a Venus or a modern-day Helen of Troy - we can suffer like Sisyphus, fail like Canute, or linger like the smile of the Cheshire Cat. This completely new reference work explains the meanings of the allu...

Relativism has dominated many intellectual circles, past and present, but the twentieth century saw it banished to the fringes of mainstream analytic philosophy. Of late, however, it is making something of a comeback within that loosely configured tradition, a comeback that attempts to capitalize on some important ideas in foundational semantics. Relativism and Monadic Truth aims not merely to combat analytic relativism but also to combat the foundational ideas in semantics that led to its reviv...

En este libro se presenta un pormenorizado examen de las caracteristicas lexicologicas y diatopicas de las designaciones de algunos conceptos corporales. Se analizan, particularmente, los nombres de los cinco dedos de la mano que aparecen representados en la geografia linguistica hispanorromance. El analisis de los atlas linguisticos se acomete desde una perspectiva multidisciplinar, pues se estudian los procedimientos que originan la variacion linguistica en su contexto geografico a partir de l...

Early modern kings adopted a new style of government, Realpolitik, as spelled out in Machiavelli's writings. Tudor monarchs, well aware of their questionable right to the throne, posed as great dissimulators, similarly to the modern prince who "must learn from the fox and the lion". This book paints a portrait of a successful politician according to early modern standards. Kingship is no longer understood as a divinely ordained institution, but is defined as goal-oriented policy-making, relying...

THE PLACE OF PHILOSOPHY IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE During the last few years, many books have been published and many meetings have been held on Cognitive Science. A cursory review of their contents shows such a diversity of topics and approaches that one might well infer that there are no genuine criteria for classifying a paper or a lecture as a contribution to Cognitive Science. It is as though the only criterion is to have appeared in a book or in the programme of a meeting or title we can find th...

Multidimensional semantic theory has greatly influenced the semantic and pragmatic research of natural languages in the past few decades, but Chinese-based research in this direction has been very scarce so far. This monograph, through five case studies, investigates the distributional, semantic and pragmatic characteristics of adverbs, logical words (negative words and conditional connectives), focus particles, pleonastic negation and classifiers in Mandarin Chinese. It provides new data from C...

This book tracks the developmental changes in writing across the schools curriculum, enhancing a key area of research in applied linguistics. Writing development has been a key area of research in applied linguistics for some time, but most work has focused on children's writing at particular ages. Christie and Derewianka draw on extensive research in both primary and secondary years to trace the developmental trajectory from age 5 or 6 through to 18. Using a systemic functional grammar, they ou...

Sagen Schauspieler auf der Buhne wahrend der Vorfuhrung in den Dialogen eigentlich die Wahrheit? Lugen Sie schamlos? Nutzen sie Sprache gar parasitar ohne jeden Anspruch auf sprechakttheoretische Konventionen? Intuitiv verneint der Grossteil aller Befragten das Erstere und ist bei Zweitem und Drittem eher ratlos. Die Linguisten zoegern. Und das seit uber 30 Jahren. Zeit, einen genaueren Blick auf die Thematik zu riskieren. Dieser offenbart schnell: schauspielerische Methoden ermoeglichen dem Dar...