The book takes as its point of departure the notion that similarity and contiguity are fundamental to meaning. It shows how they manifest in oral, literate, print, and internet cultures, in language acquisition, pragmatics, dialogism, classification, the semantics of grammar, literature, and, most centrally, metaphor and metonymy. The book situates these reflections on similarity and contiguity in the interplay of language, cognition, culture, and ideology, and within broader debates around such issues as capitalism, biodiversity, and human control over nature. Positing that while similarity-focused systems can be reductive, and have therefore been contested in social science, philosophy, and poetry, and contiguity-based ones might disregard useful statistical and scientific evidence, Andrew Goatly argues for the need for humans to entertain diverse metaphors, models, and languages as ways of understanding and acting on our world. The volume also considers the cognitive connections between the similarity-contiguity duality and the noun-verb distinction. This innovative volume will appeal to scholars involved in wider debates on meaning, within the fields of cognitive semantics, pragmatics, metaphor and metonymy theory, critical discourse analysis, and the philosophy of language. Equally, the motivated and intelligent general reader, interested in language, philosophy, culture, and ecology, should find the later chapters of the book fascinating, and the earlier technical chapters accessible.

According to two-dimensional semantics, the meaning of an expression involves two different "dimensions": one dimension involves reference and truth-conditions of a familiar sort, while the other dimension involves the way that reference and truth-conditions depend on the external world (for example, reference and truth-conditions might be held to depend on which individuals and substances are present in the world, or on which linguistic conventions are in place). A number of different two-dimensional frameworks have been developed, and these have been applied to a number of fundamental problems in philosophy: the nature of communication, the relation between the necessary and the a priori, the role of context in assertion, Frege's distinction between sense and reference, the contents of thought, and the mind-body problem. Manuel Garcia-Carpintero and Josep Macia present a selection of new essays by an outstanding international team, shedding fresh light both on foundational issues regarding two-dimensional semantics and on its specific applications. The volume will be the starting-point for future work on this approach to issues in philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics.

This book argues that in order to account for the compositional behavior of many near-synonymous items, semantic analyses need to pay close attention to at least two semantic dimensions: standard assertions and conventional implicatures, which express additional side comments. The discussed phenomena are clausal adjuncts and complements in German. The new analysis of ‘weil’ and ‘denn’ (‘because’) shows that both contribute the same semantic operator, but one as an assertion, the other as a conventional implicature. This explains why only ‘denn’ can have speech-act modifying uses. This novel two-dimensional analysis is extended to other sentence adjuncts such as regular vs. relevance conditionals, although-clauses, and sentence adverbs. Further, the book investigates certain complement clauses. It analyzes sliftings as evidential-like parentheticals which contribute their meaning on the conventional implicature dimension. In contrast, German embedded verb-second clauses are shown to be truly embedded and analyzed as operating in the assertion dimension. The verb-second syntax is shown to contribute an additional epistemic component on the conventional implicature dimension.

A visual, intuitive introduction in the form of a tour with side-quests, using direct probabilistic insight rather than technical tools.

This book offers meaningful work as one of the most relevant issues for 21st century workplaces, and organizations seeking to develop leadership and drive positive change. It uses Viktor Frankl’s legacy as a scientific and philosophical pioneer, while combining cutting edge research findings from the behavioural sciences, organizational and management research, and human resource development with outstanding examples of new work approaches of leadership from around the globe. In order to respond to 21st century demands on meaningful work, this book harnesses the power of living meaning, values, purpose and compassion in workplaces. Beate von Devivere shows managers, human resources experts, consultants, coaches, medical experts, students and counsellors as well as all dedicated individuals, how to find meaning in their organizations, their teams and individual functions and challenges, bringing Viktor Frankl’s approach to today’s workplaces. Integrating a wide range of knowledge and expertise, this book covers organizational development, management practice, and findings from psychology, neuroscience as well as therapeutic approaches and new work concepts. Meaningful work is promoting an integrated approach for the ‘Copernican turn’, further promoting meaningful work, purpose and a good life.