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38536 results in Cambridge Textbooks

Page 1545 of 1927

  • 4 - Meaning

  • Edited by Ralph W. Fasold, Georgetown University, Washington DC, Jeff Connor-Linton, Georgetown University, Washington DC
  • Book:
    An Introduction to Language and Linguistics
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    04 September 2014, pp 149-182

  • Summary

    Chapter preview

    There are two main fields within linguistics that study meaning. Semantics focuses on the literal meanings of words, phrases, and sentences; it is concerned with how grammatical processes build complex meanings out of simpler ones. Pragmatics focuses on the use of language in particular situations; it aims to explain how factors outside language contribute to both literal meaning and nonliteral meanings which speakers communicate using language. Most linguists who study meaning combine the study of semantics and pragmatics. While a semanticist is technically someone who studies semantics, in fact most semanticists investigate both semantics and pragmatics. In this chapter, we will first discuss semantics, and then pragmatics. To conclude the chapter, we will examine some foundational philosophical issues which are relevant to thinking about meaning and will discuss some of the different theoretical perspectives on meaning which are popular within linguistics today.

    GOALS

    The goals of this chapter are to:

  • explain the difference between speaker’s meaning and semantic meaning

  • introduce the complexity of lexical semantics and the basics of one way of thinking about lexical meaning

  • illustrate the role of the major grammatical constituents in semantic meaning: subjects and other arguments, predicates, modifiers, and quantifiers

  • describe the nature of intensional meaning and the basics of three intensional phenomena: modality, tense, and aspect

  • introduce four key pragmatic concepts: indexicality, presupposition, speech acts, and implicature

  • illustrate how speaker’s meaning is dependent on the context of use

  • allow students to apply key concepts to novel data

  • discuss the strengths and weaknesses of psychological and referential theories of meaning

  • 1 - The sounds of language

  • Edited by Ralph W. Fasold, Georgetown University, Washington DC, Jeff Connor-Linton, Georgetown University, Washington DC
  • Book:
    An Introduction to Language and Linguistics
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    04 September 2014, pp 15-62

  • Summary

    Chapter preview

    This chapter is about the sounds of speech. Without sound, communication can still take place – with a nod or a wave, a photograph, or a drawing. There can even be language without sound: those who cannot hear use languages based on manual signs instead. Yet for most of us most of the time, getting our message across involves encoding it in sounds. Even when we write, we use symbols that are based on speech (though sometimes not very directly).

    The study of the sounds of speech can be divided into the disciplines of phonetics and phonology. Phonetics studies speech sounds as physical objects. Phoneticians ask questions such as:

  • How are speech sounds made?

  • How do physical characteristics make people sound different?

  • How many different sounds do languages use?

  • How are different languages and dialects distinguished by the sounds they use?

  • How does sound travel through the air?

  • How is it registered by the ears?

  • How can we measure speech?

  • 5 - Discourse

  • Edited by Ralph W. Fasold, Georgetown University, Washington DC, Jeff Connor-Linton, Georgetown University, Washington DC
  • Book:
    An Introduction to Language and Linguistics
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    04 September 2014, pp 183-216

  • Summary

    Chapter preview

    Discourse is the use of language above and beyond the sentence: how people use language in texts and contexts. Discourse analysts focus on peoples’ actual utterances and try to figure out what processes make those utterances appear the way they do. Through discourse, people

  • represent the world

  • convey communicative intentions

  • organize thoughts into communicative actions

  • arrange information so it is accessible to others

  • engage in actions and interactions with one another

  • convey their identities and relationships

    • This chapter provides an overview of central concepts and methods through in-depth discussion and analyses of spoken discourse and written discourse. Models of function and coherence in spoken discourse are also presented.

    GOALS

    The goals of this chapter are to:

  • define discourse and demonstrate how to analyze spoken and written discourse

  • explain the relationship between structure and function in discourse

  • demonstrate how repair in discourse works

  • describe the effects of recipient design

  • explicate the relationship between text and context

  • describe the planes of discourse and their relationships

    • Language use above and beyond the sentence

    Almost everything that we do in our everyday lives depends on language. In fact, it is hard to even imagine what our world would be like without language. So much of what keeps people and societies together depends crucially on language. We need language to make and enforce laws; get and distribute valued resources; create and maintain personal and public relationships; teach children our ways of “being,” “thinking,” and “doing”; engage in scholarly inquiry; preserve our past and plan our future. Language allows us to make friends (and enemies), joke and argue with each other, celebrate happy occasions and mourn sad ones.

  • 1 - Good legal education

  • Adrian Evans, Monash University, Victoria
  • Book:
    The Good Lawyer
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    29 August 2014, pp 1-31

  • Summary

    Introduction: Forget money

    There are a range of reasons for choosing to study law. Some students are just unsure what to do and some are really interested in the idea of law as a concept and do not intend to become lawyers, but many are in the middle somewhere – they are attracted to the possibility of courtroom excitement and have a desire to ‘make a difference’. Advocacy in courts, in negotiation, mediation and in numerous lawyers’ offices has a marvellous potential to change the law and improve the lives of others. Assuming you have a choice, how will you decide which law school will be best for you?

    All law schools must cover a specific set of subjects which will develop a base level of legal knowledge and some skills. Many will prepare you for the broad range of lawyers’ roles. Some do it better than others. If you can comfortably make a decision about which law school to go to on your own, then go ahead. But some parents and families also want to get involved with choosing law schools and while they (of course) want a rewarding and secure career for you, they are sometimes thinking about big incomes too. When that happens, identifying preferences for a particular law school can get more complicated. The important thing is to know what your own motives are for aiming at a particular law school and law degree. Large incomes are available in some types of legal practice, but not as commonly as you may think. A small number of lawyers make a great deal of money, but most do not. If you think your priority is to make a lot of money quickly from business and you don’t really mind how, then this book will not assist you greatly.

  • 4 - Connecting character to lawyers’ roles

  • Adrian Evans, Monash University, Victoria
  • Book:
    The Good Lawyer
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    29 August 2014, pp 85-113

  • Summary

    Introduction: Character-laden law

    Previous chapters have explored what a good law school looks like and what a good legal practice environment needs. Chapter 3 then examined several dimensions of our underlying ethics and started to again make the case, just as Luban did, that general morality has a significant part to play in our legal ethics. This chapter continues that theme and connects a central aspect of underlying morality – that of our character – to the role we perform as lawyers.

    The quest to develop lawyers’ capacity for goodness has never been more important. In the short period since the new millennium, corporate failure around the Western world has focused community and judicial disillusion on the professionals implicated. Accountants, auditors, financiers and lawyers (in-house and external) have all suffered loss of reputation and self-esteem, not to mention jobs. Lawyers were rarely the main drivers of these collapses, but our entrenched role in validating and enabling deals and a wide range of financial products was always crucial. Perhaps it’s because we often think of ourselves as only the mouthpiece, never the mouth – in the comfortable lawyer role of agent, not actor – that as a profession, we do not seem to have been interested in offering much by way of apology for those momentous events in 2007–08. But some atonement may be possible by strengthening individual lawyers’ character. We may then be able to show enough compassion for the victims of our mistakes (and in some cases our greed), to limit the impact of traditional role morality and the risk of recurrence.

  • 2 - The law practice landscape: Choosing to be a ‘good’ lawyer in a good law firm

  • Adrian Evans, Monash University, Victoria
  • Book:
    The Good Lawyer
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    29 August 2014, pp 32-61

  • Summary

    The connection between good lawyering and good legal communities

    Good lawyers need a credible, practical framework to be good in, so to speak. So where you practise law and who you practise it with are important in supporting your good lawyering. Even barristers, who are comfortable working alone and who are independent in the sense that they have no employer except themselves, are commonly co-located in ‘chambers’ for a reason: so that they can seek support when they need it. Lawyers’ reputations matter because there is a fundamental two-way connection between being a good lawyer and being in a good (that is, morally sustainable) legal practice. This reality is supported by a small but comprehensive pilot study of 11 new Australian lawyers in the ACT, which emphasises that first-year lawyers learn what is expected of them as professionals, for good or otherwise, from the legal community in which they are first operating.

    The sum total of how you see your role as a lawyer will define you as you advance through the law. This is where you begin to develop your reputation: the hard-to-pin-down mix of what others think of your knowledge and skills, your trustworthiness, your willingness to prepare thoroughly and your sense of appropriate ethical behaviour. Notice that this list begins but does not stop with your intelligence. High IQ will not be enough to mark your professionalism or determine your success, because they depend on the harder things – the virtues (trust, diligence and judgment) – which must be demonstrated just as convincingly as your intelligence.

  • 6 - Professional secrets

  • Adrian Evans, Monash University, Victoria
  • Book:
    The Good Lawyer
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    29 August 2014, pp 134-154

  • Summary

    Introduction: The shrinking world of secrets

    Consider this situation:

    You are a large law firm leader. You have just been told by another senior partner that s/he has been having an affair with the Chief Legal Officer of one of the firm’s major clients. Both your partner and the CLO are currently married, but not to each other. To your knowledge, no one at the client company knows of the affair as yet.

    What will you do?

    This particular secret is about to become less secret anyway, since office romances are inevitably known to someone, despite best efforts at discretion. But will the client company be keen for this relationship to come out, so to speak? Do you – or does your firm – owe that client any duty of confidentiality here? Does your colleague understand what a conflict of interest is? And what will the client company consider to be at stake, quite apart from whether your colleague wants everything to stay quiet? When it all goes ‘pear-shaped’, will your firm be blamed if you do nothing while you have the chance?

    Lawyers are full of secrets, just like everyone else. But some secrets we hold as lawyers are a bit different. When we learn something from a client in the course of our job as a lawyer, we are usually required to keep that information secret. Non-lawyers can generally disclose ‘secrets’ without any particular legal consequences, but we can be disciplined and sometimes sued if we breach our client’s confidentiality. In the case above, it is not impossible that the client corporation would agree that while you do not owe it a formal duty of confidentiality in relation to this affair, once you became aware of the situation you should tell them about it, so that all concerned can discuss the considerable implications for the client.

  • 8 - The morality of competence

  • Adrian Evans, Monash University, Victoria
  • Book:
    The Good Lawyer
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    29 August 2014, pp 178-199

  • Summary

    Introduction: Competence requires morality

    Most clients think of good lawyers as people who are skilled and therefore effective in achieving outcomes. These ideas reflect the common notion that technical ‘competency’ is an important quality which lawyers ought to have. This has to be correct, as far as it goes, but it’s really the combination of intelligence, technical skill and ethics that is important. Previous chapters have concentrated on the many dimensions of moral goodness because these are under-appreciated in modern lawyering. But you will not be surprised that even competence requires applied morality: that is, the exercise of judgment. The simplest of illustrations makes this clear:

    Are you known for getting things done comfortably on time, or for working right up to deadlines and/or being ‘a little bit late’?

    If the latter is the case, could your attitude to deadlines be a problem for your professional competency?

    A habit of delivering work right on a deadline or occasionally a little after is not, in the scheme of things, what most people would call a problem. The volume of work and workplace stress may be such that it is physically impossible to complete tasks before deadlines and still have some balance in life. But if your normal, ‘unstressed’ approach to completing work is to finalise and deliver it on the deadline, you may not be leaving sufficient margin for your own error or allowing for delay caused by others. On occasion, both of these factors will cause you to overshoot and be late. If this is truly occasional, no reputation loss is likely, but otherwise, your competence will inevitably be questioned even though your other skills are not at issue.

  • 7 - Conflicts of loyalty and interest

  • Adrian Evans, Monash University, Victoria
  • Book:
    The Good Lawyer
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    29 August 2014, pp 155-177

  • Summary

    Introduction: What is a conflict of interest and why are conflicts so difficult?

    Consider this vignette, which is constructed from a number of decided cases.

    Documents, faxes, emails and drinks

    You are working in a merger team on the 4th floor of a large transnational law firm. Your client is Emirates Airways, which has proposed a merger with QANTAS, now that their code share alliance is succeeding.

    On the 3rd floor, another team from your firm is working for QANTAS on the same issue. QANTAS is struggling financially, but both airlines have developed some confidence in each other and think they can save some legal costs by using just the one law firm – yours.

    The firm’s email system blocks the access of either team to emails from the other team, so that both teams can work independently of each other. But early one morning an email is copied to you from someone you think you remember meeting the previous evening at the firm’s cocktails event, which was held to celebrate the merger deal. You do not have any clear memory of the evening or what was said, but the email contains vague references to a financial problem in QANTAS, which seems to have debts that you know Emirates is not aware of. The author of the mail is proposing a 3rd floor meeting to discuss how this debt issue will be handled. You are immediately concerned.

    What should you do with the email?

Page 1545 of 1927