How to Do Things With Words

The measurement of meaning

語用論(Pragmatics)を考える

人教版高中英语新课程教材中,语言运用（Using Language）是每个单元必不可少的部分,提供了围绕单元中心话题的听、说、读、写的综合性练习,是单元中心话题的延续和升华.如何设计Using Language部分的教学,使自己的教学模式既不落俗套,又能真正体现新课程标准所倡导的教学理念,正是广大一线英语教师一直努力探索的问题.

打磨Using Language,倡导新理念

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language

Many words and expressions are viewed as 'taboo', such as those used to describe sex, our bodies and their functions, and those used to insult other people. This 2006 book provides a fascinating insight into taboo language and its role in everyday life. It looks at the ways we use language to be polite or impolite, politically correct or offensive, depending on whether we are 'sweet-talking', 'straight-talking' or being deliberately rude. Using a range of colourful examples, it shows how we use language playfully and figuratively in order to swear, to insult, and also to be politically correct, and what our motivations are for doing so. It goes on to examine the differences between institutionalized censorship and the ways individuals censor their own language. Lively and revealing, Forbidden Words will fascinate anyone who is interested in how and why we use and avoid taboos in daily conversation.

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Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Euphemism and Dysphemism: Language Used as Shield and Weapon

Language and Other Abstract Objects

The customary disjunctive marking of lexical entries for English nouns as [+ countable] does not match the fact that the majority can be used both countably and uncountably in different NP environments: this binary opposition is characteristic not of the nouns, but of the NP's which they head. Nevertheless, nouns do have countability preferences; some enter countable environments more readily than others. And not all nouns occur in all kinds of countability environments. A noun's countability preference can be computed by checking its potential for occurrence in a definitive set of countability environments. In the dialect examined here, wellformedness conditions on NP must consider eight levels of countability among English nouns-not, as custom has it, only two.*

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/414449.pdf

Keith Allan

Papers

Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Euphemism and Dysphemism: Language Used as Shield and Weapon

Language and Other Abstract Objects

Nouns and Countability

Mass Terms: Some Philosophical Problems