In our multimedia age, text description presents many conceptual problems: texts, as cultural objects, cannot be interpreted without descriptions of genre, communicative conditions, and language, which positivist approaches have proved unable to provide. Semantics for Descriptions addresses itself as much to linguists as to computer scientists, arguing that rational hermeneutics can offer better descriptive methods by allowing the theoretical and practical conditions of text interpretation to be defined.

Multiple interrogatives, questions with multiple wh-phrases (e.g. Who bought what?), have long presented analytical challenges for linguistic theory. This monograph presents a new theoretical and experimental study of this construction. The theoretical findings concern the interaction between superiority effects, subject-auxiliary inversion, and the distribution of pair-list and single-pair readings cross-linguistically. The author examines multiple interrogatives under sluicing (i.e. clausal ellipsis), presenting new arguments for the deletion analysis of sluicing

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks as well as studies that provide new insights by building bridges to neighbouring fields such as neuroscience and cognitive science.

By bringing together research on language rights, language 'survival' and minority language planning in specific contexts from Africa, Asia, Central and North America and Europe, this book illustrates how conceptualizations of language rights can sometimes stand in the way of their successful realization

Introducing Pragmatics in Use is a lively and accessible introduction to pragmatics, which both covers theory and applies it to real spoken and written data.

Pragmatics is the study of language in context, yet most textbooks rely on invented language examples. This innovative textbook systematically draws on language corpora to illustrate features such as creativity in small talk or how we apologise in English. The authors investigate the pragmatic implications of the globalisation of the English language and focus on the applications of pragmatics for teaching languages.