'What is the meaning of a word?' In this thought-provoking book, Hagberg demonstrates how this question--which initiated Wittgenstein's later work in the philosophy of language--is significant for our understanding not only of linguistic meaning but of the meaning of works of art and literature as well.

Donna Santman shows you how to teach readers the skills and strategies of comprehension and interpretation within the framework of a reading workshop.

The study of legal semiotics emphasizes the contingency and fluidity of legal concepts and stresses the existence of overlapping, competing and coexisting legal discourses. New problems, changing power structures and societal norms and new faces of injustice – all these force reconsideration, reformulation and even replacement of established doctrines. This book focuses on the application of law in a wide variety of contexts, including international politics and diplomatic practice.

Unravels dream symbols and their meanings What do reoccurring dreams reveal? What's the purpose of nightmares—and can they be stopped? Why do some people show up in dreams? Are some dreams actually warnings? Going beyond superficial explanations, The Dream Interpretation Dictionary: Symbols, Signs and Meanings brings a deep and rich understanding to a variety of images, signs, and symbols. It considers the context to help anyone complete their own personal jigsaw puzzle. It provides the tools to allow anyone to sort through possible connections and to make sense of their dreams. From entries ranging from “Abandonment” to “Zoo,” this massive tome analyzes sex dreams, money dreams, dreams of falling, running, or paralysis and much, much more. It brings profound insights to thousands of dream messages. It shows what to look for and what to ignore and teaches how to master dream interpretation. Examples of symbols are given. The complexity and context of a dream are explored. Signs and their meanings are illustrated. Illuminating the intelligence of dreams, decoding clues, explaining symbols, and revealing the universal meanings of each as well as their subtler associations, The Dream Interpretation Dictionary: Symbols, Signs, and Meanings explores the messages delivered by the unconscious mind during sleep. It examines how dreams connect to daily life. It shows how dreams can lead to deeper understanding and self-awareness. Also included are a helpful bibliography and an extensive index, adding to the book’s usefulness.

By exploring the relationship between music and the moving image in film narrative, David Neumeyer shows that film music is not conceptually separate from sound or dialogue, but that all three are manipulated and continually interact in the larger acoustical world of the sound track. In a medium in which the image has traditionally trumped sound, Neumeyer turns our attention to the voice as the mechanism through which narrative (dialog, speech) and sound (sound effects, music) come together. Complemented by music examples, illustrations, and contributions by James Buhler, Meaning and Interpretation of Music in Cinema is the capstone of Neumeyer’s 25-year project in the analysis and interpretation of music in film.

David Bordwell's new book is at once a history of film criticism, an analysis of how critics interpret film, and a proposal for an alternative program for film studies. It is an anatomy of film criticism meant to reset the agenda for film scholarship. As such Making Meaning should be a landmark book, a focus for debate from which future film study will evolve. Bordwell systematically maps different strategies for interpreting films and making meaning, illustrating his points with a vast array of examples from Western film criticism. Following an introductory chapter that sets out the terms and scope of the argument, Bordwell goes on to show how critical institutions constrain and contain the very practices they promote, and how the interpretation of texts has become a central preoccupation of the humanities. He gives lucid accounts of the development of film criticism in France, Britain, and the United States since World War II; analyzes this development through two important types of criticism, thematic-explicatory and symptomatic; and shows that both types, usually seen as antithetical, in fact have much in common. These diverse and even warring schools of criticism share conventional, rhetorical, and problem-solving techniques--a point that has broad-ranging implications for the way critics practice their art. The book concludes with a survey of the alternatives to criticism based on interpretation and, finally, with the proposal that a historical poetics of cinema offers the most fruitful framework for film analysis.

Brian G. Slocum's Ordinary Meaning offers an extended legal-linguistic analysis of the eponymous interpretive doctrine. A centuries-old consensus exists among courts and legal scholars that words in legal texts should be interpreted in light of accepted standards of communication. Therefore the questions of what makes some meaning the ordinary one, and how the determinants of ordinary meaning are identified and conceptualized, are of crucial importance to the interpretation of legal texts. Arguing against reliance on acontextual dictionary definitions, Ordinary Meaning rigorously explores the contributions that specific context makes to meaning, along with linguistic phenomena such as indexicals and quantifiers. Slocum provides a theory and a robust general framework for how the determinants of ordinary meaning should be identified and developed.