Antony Hudek is research fellow at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts, London. --

This volume presents a reasoned study of the discourse connectives of attainment of the French language. For the most part, the studies on connectives are based on referentialist descriptive frameworks, which are sustained more or less explicitly on what we have called the general problem of causality, the epistemological foundation of a scientific paradigm which has been used for centuries but which, in our opinion, is now outdated. In the first place, we have submitted this old paradigm to critical debate, showing the limits of its scientific validity. Next, we have placed ourselves in a non-referentialist linguistic framework, the Theory of Argumentation in the Language-System, developed by the French linguist Oswald Ducrot, in which we have formulated a new descriptive proposal for discourse connectives, taking into account both the argumentative configuration and the polyphonic configuration of each of the discourse dynamics generated around a given connective. We have described the argumentative configuration in terms of semantic blocks, and the polyphonic configuration in terms of discourse algorithms, original and innovative heuristic instruments with which we attempt to stimulate a new approach to language more in line with the general scientific approaches of the 21st century, and with the new scientific paradigm which is currently valid.

Writing is not like chemical engineering. The figures of speech should not be learned the same way as the periodic table of elements. This is because figures of speech are not about hypothetical structures in things, but about real potentialities within language and within ourselves. The "figurings" of speech reveal the apparently limitless plastic

Drawing on range of text genres including novels, poems, health forums, holiday guestbooks, prayers, political songs and news stories, each chapter uses cognitive linguistics to shed light on the meanings and meaning-making processes invoked when we encounter texts belonging to different literary and political genres. The book presents new insights into the workings of textual phenomena such as metaphor, viewpoint and deixis and also sheds light on more elusive, epiphenomenal qualities such as a text's ambience, atmosphere, power, ideology or persuasiveness. It also takes new strides in cognitive text analysis by exploiting experimental and ethnographic methods to empirically investigate readers' reception of, and resistance to, texts.

Now reissued and retypeset, this canonical book explores the role of language and images in newspaper, radio, online and television news. The authors introduce useful frameworks for analysing language, image and the interaction between the two, and illustrate these with authentic news stories from around the English-speaking world, ranging from the Oktoberfest to environmental disasters to the killing of Osama bin Laden. This analysis persuasively illustrates how events are retold in the news and made 'newsworthy' through both language and image. This clearly written and accessible introduction to news discourse is essential reading for students, lecturers and researchers in linguistics, media and journalism studies and semiotics.

In the past two decades there has been considerable interest in the ways in which subjects are positioned in discursive practice. This interest has entailed a focus on the role of language and discourse in the processes in and through which subjects are constituted in discourse. However, questions of agency and how it relates to consciousness have received less attention. This book explores the ways in which agency and consciousness are created through transactions between self and other. The book argues that it is necessary to regard body-brain interactions in the context of the social and discursive practices which act upon human bodies. These issues of agency and individuation are explored in relation to infant semiosis, as well as in relation to children's symbolic play. Thibault looks at the importance of the self-referential moral conscience in relation to the interpersonal dimension of all acts of meaning-making. This conscience is also connected to the development of a self-referential viewpoint which the book argues is connected to the ecosocial semiotic systems of thinking about consciousness as a complex system operating on many different levels. The author discusses and evaluates the work of linguists, psychologists, biologists, semioticians, and sociologists such as Basil Bernstein, Mikhail Bakhtin, J. J. Gibson, M. A. K. Halliday, Walter Kauffman, Lakoff & Johnson, Jay Lemke, Jean Piaget and Stanley Salthe, to develop a new theory of agency and consciousness.