Ted Kaczynski's manifesto. The ransom note for Jon Benet Ramsey. The anthrax letters threatening our government and media agencies. With the aid of forensic linguistics, the words criminals leave behind in their unsigned letters can be as distinctive as a signature or voice. Although the linguistic study of language is well established, this important analytical tool is something new for many jurors, judges, attorneys, and other forensic specialists dealing with both criminal and civil cases.
Added by: evren85 | Karma: 163.59 | Fiction literature | 30 January 2008
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Purple Cow by Seth Godin
You're either a Purple Cow or you're not. You're either remarkable or invisible. Make your choice.
What do Starbucks and JetBlue and KrispyKreme and Apple and DutchBoy and Kensington and Zespri and Hard Candy have that you don't? How do they continue to confound critics and achieve spectacular growth, leaving behind former tried-and true brands to gasp their last?
Face it, the checklist of tired 'P's marketers have used for decades to get their product noticed -Pricing, Promotion, Publicity, to name a few-aren't working anymore. There's an exceptionally important 'P' that has to be added to the list. It's Purple Cow.
Cows, after you've seen one, or two, or ten, are boring. A Purple Cow, though...now that would be something. Purple Cow describes something phenomenal, something counterintuitive and exciting and flat out unbelievable. Every day, consumers come face to face with a lot of boring stuff-a lot of brown cows-but you can bet they won't forget a Purple Cow. And it's not a marketing function that you can slap on to your product or service. Purple Cow is inherent. It's built right in, or it's not there. Period.
In Purple Cow, Seth Godin urges you to put a Purple Cow into everything you build, and everything you do, to create something truly noticeable. It's a manifesto for marketers who want to help create products that are worth marketing in the first place.
How to Do Things With Words is perhaps Austin's most influential work. In it he attacks what was at his time a predominant account in philosophy, namely, the view that the chief business of sentences is to state facts, and thus to be true or false based on the truth or falsity of those facts. In contrast to this common view, he argues, truth-evaluable sentences form only a small part of the range of utterances. After introducing several kinds of sentences which he assumes are indeed not truth-evaluable, he turns in particular to one of these kinds of sentences, which he deems performative utterances. These he characterises by two features:
* First, to utter one of these sentences is not just to "say" something, but rather to perform a certain kind of action.
* Second, these sentences are not true or false; rather, when something goes wrong in connection with the utterance then the utterance is, as he puts it, "infelicitous", or "unhappy."
The action which performative sentences 'perform' when they are uttered belongs to what Austin later calls a speech act (more particularly, the kind of action Austin has in mind is what he subsequently terms the illocutionary act). For example, if you say “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth," and the circumstances are appropriate in certain ways, then you will have done something special, namely, you will have performed the act of naming the ship. Other examples include: "I take this man as my lawfully wedded husband," used in the course of a marriage ceremony, or "I bequeath this watch to my brother," as occurring in a will. In all three cases the sentence is not being used to describe or state what one is 'doing', but being used to actually 'do' it.
BBC audio course with scripts in mp3 уровень upper-intermediate
Working Abroad' is for those of you who've always wanted to get out of your chairs and go and do something else instead.
