This volume presents interdisciplinary and international contributions to relevant issues debated in the Social Sciences, specifically in the field of Discourse Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis. It also marks two celebrations. The first is the existence for about thirty years now of CDA and its forerunner Critical Linguistics. The second is the end of a six year research centre financed by the Wittgenstein Prize, awarded in 1996 to the first editor, RuthWodak, of the present volume, by the Austrian Science Foundation (FWF).

Insensitive Semantics is an overview of and contribution to the debates about how to accommodate context sensitivity within a theory of human communication, investigating the effects of context on communicative interaction and, as a corollary, what a context of utterance is and what it is to be in one.

• Provides detailed and wide-ranging overviews of the central positions and arguments surrounding contextualism
  

• Addresses broad and varied aspects of the distinction between the semantic and non-semantic content of language
  

• Defends a distinctive and explanatorily powerful combination of semantic minimalism and speech act pluralism
  

• Confronts core problems which not only run to the heart of philosophy of language and linguistics, but which arise in epistemology, metaphysics, and moral philosophy as well

Although speech is the primary behavioral medium by which humans communicate, its auditory basis is poorly understood, having profound implications on efforts to ameliorate the behavioral consequences of hearing impairment and on the development of robust algorithms for computer speech recognition. In this volume, the authors provide an up-to-date synthesis of recent research in the area of speech processing in the auditory system, bringing together a diverse range of scientists to present the subject from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Asking Questions examines a central phenomenon of language - the use of sentences to ask questions. Although there is a sizable literature on the syntax and semantics of interrogatives, the logic of "questions", and the speech act of questioning, no one has tried to put the syntax and semantics together with the speech acts over the full range of phenomena we pretheoretically think of as asking questions. Robert Fiengo not only does this, but also takes up some more foundational issues in the theory of language. By positioning the findings of contemporary grammatical theorizing within the larger domain of language use, Fiengo challenges the use theorist to acknowledge the importance of grammatical form and the grammarian to acknowledge the importance of use.

The German Language introduces students of German to a linguistic way of looking at the language. Written from a Chomksyan perspective, this volume covers the basic structural components of the German language: syntax, morphology, phonetics, phonology, and the lexicon.

• Explores the linguistic structure of German from current theoretical perspectives.
  
• Written from a Chomksyan perspective, this volume covers the basic structural components of the German language: syntax, morphology, phonetics, phonology, and the lexicon.
  
• Serves as a valuable resource for students of German language and literature and for linguists with little or no background in the language.
  
• Includes exercises, definitions of key terms, and suggestions for further reading.

Also a very good material for comparative linguistics.