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Constructing Panic: The Discourse of Agoraphobia
by Lisa Capps Elinor OchsMeg Logan has not been farther than two miles from home in six years. She has agoraphobia, a debilitating anxiety disorder that entraps its sufferers in the fear of leaving safe havens such as home. Paradoxically, while at this safe haven, agoraphobics spend much of their time ruminating over past panic experiences and imagining similar hypothetical situations. In doing so, they create a narrative that both describes their experience and locks them into it. Constructing Panic offers an unprecedented analysis of one patient's experience of agoraphobia. In this novel interdisciplinary collaboration between a clinical psychologist and a linguist, the authors probe Meg's stories for constructions of emotions, actions, and events. They illustrate how Meg uses grammar and narrative structure to create and recreate emotional experiences that maintain her agoraphobic identity. In this work Capps and Ochs propose a startling new view of agoraphobia as a communicative disorder. Constructing Panic opens up the largely overlooked potential for linguistic and narrative analysis by revealing the roots of panic and by offering a unique framework for therapeutic intervention. Readers will find in these pages hope for managing panic through careful attention to how we tell the story of our lives.
Constructing Postmodernism
by Brian McHaleBrian McHale provides a series of readings of a wide range of postmodernist fiction, from Eco's Foucault's Pendulum to the works of cyberpunk science-fiction, relating the works to aspects of postmodern popular culture.
Constructing Reality: The "Operationalization" of Bateson’s Conjecture on Cognition (SpringerBriefs in Psychology)
by Piero MellaThis brief presents an overview of Gregory Bateson’s Constructivist method of Cognition. Bateson proposes a theory of cognition that is based on the abstract notion of difference that the mind distinguishes and perceives and represents information that constitutes and separates how different states are ordered, grouped, and classified. Bateson, however, does not clearly indicate how a cognitive system can develop a knowledge of reality from the perception of these differences. This book seeks to offer a scientific approach to Constructivism. Using Bateson’s hypothesis, chapters discuss how our mind distinguishes and elaborates differences, allowing us to form perceptions of objects, and how these objects can be described and compared. Chapters also discuss how from differences, it is possible to construct concepts or ideas of how these can be defined and how to derive from these differences the meanings of the signs used for the structuring of languages. The brief offers a coherent structure of propositions that form an interpretative theory of the modus operandi of the human mind, which will be useful not only in shedding light on our cognitive processes, but also in laying the formal groundwork for artificial intelligence. Constructing Reality is a must-have resource for researchers and students of the cognitive sciences, as well as education sciences, and researchers and scholars of artificial intelligence, learning theory, and intelligent automata programming.
Constructing Strong Foundations of Early Literacy
by Malinda E. Jones Ann E. ChristensenThis text provides a comprehensive understanding of the foundational literacy knowledge, skills, behaviors, and attitudes necessary to guide emerging readers and writers in early childhood. Centered on the critical question of why some children learn to read easily, while others do not, this text walks readers through developmentally appropriate goal setting based on the foundational literacy skills that are critical for preschool and kindergarten children to develop. Written in an authoritative yet accessible style, chapters offer instructional strategies, insights, and scenarios from educators, self-reflection, and a variety of methods for implementation. Each chapter also includes differentiation for children with language and learning challenges as well as dual language learners, exploring methods for valuing the home language while building critical literacy skills in the classroom. Providing critical skills for guiding all emerging readers to an independent reading level, this is an essential resource for both students in early childhood, literacy, and special education courses and educators in early childhood public education, non-profit preschool settings such as Head Start, home and daycare settings, and private and corporate care and education centers.
Constructing the Adolescent Reader in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction (Critical Approaches to Children's Literature)
by Elisabeth Rose GrunerThis book examines the way young adult readers are constructed in a variety of contemporary young adult fictions, arguing that contemporary young adult novels depict readers as agents. Reading, these novels suggest, is neither an unalloyed good nor a dangerous ploy, but rather an essential, occasionally fraught, by turns escapist and instrumental, deeply pleasurable, and highly contentious activity that has value far beyond the classroom skills or the specific content it conveys. After an introductory chapter that examines the state of reading and young adult fiction today, the book examines novels that depict reading in school, gendered and racialized reading, reading magical and religious books, and reading as a means to developing civic agency. These examinations reveal that books for teens depict teen readers as doers, and suggest that their ability to read deeply, critically, and communally is crucial to the development of adolescent agency.
Constructing the Beginning: Discourses of Creation Science (Routledge Communication Series)
by Simon LockeIn Constructing the Beginning, Simon Locke offers a new approach to considering the enigma of creation science, using the perspective of discourse analysis. Using the publications of the British Creation Science Movement to perform a detailed analysis of the creationist case, Locke demonstrates that the discourses and rhetorics used by natural and social scientists are also employed by non-scientists. Out of this study, a view of science as a cultural resource develops, questioning the adequacy of perceived sociological wisdom that sees science as the source and emmbodiment of cultural "rationalization." As a case study of the use of science as a discursive resource in everyday life, Constructing the Beginning speaks to scholars of discourse analysis, constructionism, rhetorics, and the public understanding of science. It will also be of great interest to scholars in the areas of cultural studies, sociology of scientific knowledge and of religion, postmodernism, and sociological theory. Additional Copy Creation science is the target of much attack these days from both within and outside of the orthodox scientific community. This book, however, takes a different approach. It is not an attack on creationism; nor is it a defense. The author's interest is not in creationism at all, but rather, it is in the questions of the role and significance of science in modernity or the public understanding of science. Locke's approach to this issue is a discursive and rhetorical one. Creationism is treated as a case study of the argumentative engagement between science and non-science which--in his view--is as central to the commonsense lifeworld of modernity as much as it is to the lives of its intellectuals. An important dimension of the public meaning of science in modernity is its limits and its relations with other modes of thought and belief, which continue to survive as discourses in the wider culture. Creationism is merely one example of this general feature. The book begins with a discussion of the current issues in the public understanding of science in relation to traditional sociological views of the impact of science on modernity. This is examined through rationalization and the contrasting view derived from the sociology of scientific knowledge which points to the likelihood of a much more complex and variable relationship than rationalization proposes. It continues with an argument and detailed analysis that focuses on three main points: *the problem of a competing account of reality (the world), in the form of evolution; *the problem of competing accounts of the Bible (the Word), in the form of different versions of Christianity; and *the realization that both of these problems must be managed together in such a way that creationists' own version(s) of the world and of the Word are compatible--a compatibility achieved through a discursive syncretism. The final chapter brings together the strands of the argument to further develop the implications of the dilemma of science for the public understanding of science through the idea of science as a cultural resource and its possible relation to other such cultural resources within modernity--such as Christianity. It is suggested that much so-called "anti-science" could be made sense of in these terms and proposes further research in this direction.
Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men's Literature and Culture, 1775-1995
by Maurice O. WallaceIn seven representative episodes of black masculine literary and cultural history--from the founding of the first African American Masonic lodge in 1775 to the 1990s choreographies of modern dance genius Bill T. Jones--Constructing the Black Masculine maps black men's historical efforts to negotiate the frequently discordant relationship between blackness and maleness in the cultural logic of American identity. Maurice O. Wallace draws on an impressive variety of material to investigate the survivalist strategies employed by black men who have had to endure the disjunction between race and masculinity in American culture. Highlighting their chronic objectification under the gaze of white eyes, Wallace argues that black men suffer a social and representational crisis in being at once seen and unseen, fetish and phantasm, spectacle and shadow in the American racial imagination. Invisible and disregarded on one hand, black men, perceived as potential threats to society, simultaneously face the reality of hypervisibility and perpetual surveillance. Paying significant attention to the sociotechnologies of vision and image production over two centuries, Wallace shows how African American men--as soldiers, Freemasons, and romantic heroes--have sought both to realize the ideal image of the American masculine subject and to deconstruct it in expressive mediums like modern dance, photography, and theatre. Throughout, he draws on the experiences and theories of such notable figures as Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and James Baldwin.
Constructing the Canon of Children's Literature: Beyond Library Walls and Ivory Towers (Children's Literature and Culture #Vol. 31)
by Anne LundinIn this pioneering historical study, Anne Lundin argues that schools, libraries, professional organizations, and the media together create and influence the constantly changing canon of children's literature. Lundin examines the circumstances out of which the canon emerges, and its effect on the production of children's literature. The volume includes a comprehensive list of canonical titles for reference.
Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama
by Jeremy LopezFor one hundred years the drama of Shakespeare's contemporaries has been consistently represented in anthologies, edited texts, and the critical tradition by a familiar group of about two dozen plays running from Kyd's Spanish Tragedy to Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore by way of Dekker, Jonson, Middleton and Webster. How was this canon created, and what ideological and institutional functions does it serve? What preceded it, and is it possible for it to become something else? Jeremy Lopez takes up these questions by tracing a history of anthologies of 'non-Shakespearean' drama from Robert Dodsley's Select Collection of Old Plays (1744) through those recently published by Blackwell, Norton, and Routledge. Containing dozens of short, provocative readings of unfamiliar plays, this book will benefit those who seek a broader sense of the period's dazzling array of forms.
Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder
by Ann RominesWith more than thirty-five million copies in print, the Little House series, written in the 1930s and 1940s by Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane has been a spectacular commercial success. This work examines what elements of the eight books account for the series' enduring power and what the novels tell us about 19th-century culture.
The Construction Alphabet Book (Jerry Pallotta's Alphabet Books)
by Jerry PallottaFor fans of all things that go this noisy alphabet book explores construction equipment from A to Z. Find out about these construction machines and more, from a huge saw that cuts through roads to a massive vacuum that sucks up boulders. You'll even learn a quick and easy recipe for concrete. Rock crushers, jackhammers, and wrecking balls will delight the youngest of readers learning their ABCs. Jerry Pallotta's trademark humor punctuates the informative text. Vibrant oil paintings bring to life a busy construction site.
Construction and Analysis of Cryptographic Functions
by Lilya BudaghyanThis book covers novel research on construction and analysis of optimal cryptographic functions such as almost perfect nonlinear (APN), almost bent (AB), planar and bent functions. These functions have optimal resistance to linear and/or differential attacks, which are the two most powerful attacks on symmetric cryptosystems. Besides cryptographic applications, these functions are significant in many branches of mathematics and information theory including coding theory, combinatorics, commutative algebra, finite geometry, sequence design and quantum information theory. The author analyzes equivalence relations for these functions and develops several new methods for construction of their infinite families. In addition, the book offers solutions to two longstanding open problems, including the problem on characterization of APN and AB functions via Boolean, and the problem on the relation between two classes of bent functions.
Construction Grammar (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics)
by Thomas HoffmannWhat do speakers of a language have to know, and what can they 'figure out' on the basis of that knowledge, in order for them to use their language successfully? This is the question at the heart of Construction Grammar, an approach to the study of language that views all dimensions of language as equal contributors to shaping linguistic expressions. The trademark characteristic of Construction Grammar is the insight that language is a repertoire of more or less complex patterns – constructions – that integrate form and meaning. This textbook shows how a Construction Grammar approach can be used to analyse the English language, offering explanations for language acquisition, variation and change. It covers all levels of syntactic description, from word-formation and inflectional morphology to phrasal and clausal phenomena and information-structure constructions. Each chapter includes exercises and further readings, making it an accessible introduction for undergraduate students of linguistics and English language.
Construction Learning as a Complex Adaptive System: Psycholinguistic Evidence from L2 Learners of English (SpringerBriefs in Education)
by Annalisa BaicchiThis book presents the current state of the art on Construction Grammar models and usage-based language learning research. It reports on three psycholinguistic experiments conducted with the participation of university-level Italian learners of English, whose second language proficiency corresponds to levels B1 and B2 of the 'Common European Framework of Reference for Languages' (CEFR). This empirical research on the role of constructions in the facilitation of language learning contributes to assessing how bilinguals deal with L2 constructions in the light of sentence-sorting, sentence-elicitation, and sentence-completion tasks. Divided into two parts, the book first introduces the main theoretical prerequisites and then reports on the experimental studies. It provides a comprehensive review of the current research in a range of disciplines, including complexity theories, cognitive semantics, construction grammars, usage-based linguistics, and language learning.
The Construction of Corporate Identities by Chinese and American Airlines on Social Media: A Cross-Cultural Multimodal Study
by Ying HuaUsing top Chinese and American airlines as examples, this book approaches the construction of corporate identities on social media, a critical issue in corporate communication, from a cross-cultural multimodal perspective. Through a holistic and systematic multimodal analysis, it provides a comprehensive cross-cultural understanding of corporate identity construction on social media. By developing an integrated social semiotic framework based on registerial cartography in SFL, it investigates the airlines’ registerial activity patterns in terms of macro-level configuration and micro-level multimodal realizations, interprets their situated contextual patterns that delineate the construction of corporate identities and further explains the influence of cultural factors. Given that this book offers theoretical contributions to corporate identity and cross-cultural communication research, practical guidance on PR practices, especially in the context of Chinese enterprises going global, and pedagogical insights for business communication courses, this book will be of particular benefit to researchers in linguistics, management and communication studies, PR practitioners, and both lecturers and learners of business communication courses.
The Construction of Irish Identity in American Literature (Routledge Transnational Perspectives On American Literature Ser. #13)
by Christopher DowdThis book examines the development of literary constructions of Irish-American identity from the mid-nineteenth century arrival of the Famine generation through the Great Depression. It goes beyond an analysis of negative Irish stereotypes and shows how Irish characters became the site of intense cultural debate regarding American identity, with some writers imagining Irishness to be the antithesis of Americanness, but others suggesting Irishness to be a path to Americanization. This study emphasizes the importance of considering how a sense of Irishness was imagined by both Irish-American writers conscious of the process of self-definition as well as non-Irish writers responsive to shifting cultural concerns regarding ethnic others. It analyzes specific iconic Irish-American characters including Mark Twain’s Huck Finn and Margaret Mitchell’s Scarlet O’Hara, as well as lesser-known Irish monsters who lurked in the American imagination such as T.S. Eliot’s Sweeney and Frank Norris’ McTeague. As Dowd argues, in contemporary American society, Irishness has been largely absorbed into a homogenous white culture, and as a result, it has become a largely invisible ethnicity to many modern literary critics. Too often, they simply do not see Irishness or do not think it relevant, and as a result, many Irish-American characters have been de-ethnicized in the critical literature of the past century. This volume reestablishes the importance of Irish ethnicity to many characters that have come to be misread as generically white and shows how Irishness is integral to their stories.
The Construction of News in a Polarised State: Maltese Advocacy Journalism (Routledge Focus on Communication and Society)
by Adrian HillmanTaking a qualitative approach based on original case studies, this book offers a detailed overview of the contemporary media system in Malta. Three Maltese news organisations are examined to understand the editorial routines, ownership and management structures, and social and cultural factors that affect the day-to-day business of creating news. In-depth interviews with key stakeholders of each organisation are conducted alongside qualitative textual analysis of the content they publish. Contrary to previous research, the work finds that advocacy continues to dominate Maltese journalism, indicating that the country has retained similarities to other media systems within its geographic region. While recognising that the gold standard in journalism is judged to be objectivity and balance, a case is made for a responsible, measured form of advocacy journalism to extend media diversity and contribute to a high level of national political engagement. Presenting an informed case for the need to pay closer attention to small states, especially at a time when many countries are seen to be becoming increasingly socially and politically divided, The Construction of News in a Polarised State is an insightful text for scholars and academics in the fields of media and communication studies, political science, and sociology.
The Construction of Professional Discourse (Language In Social Life)
by B.L. Gunnarsson Per Linell Bengt NordbergInternationally, there is increasing research and interest in the processes of the production and reception of texts for specific purposes and in the historical development of genres and registers within Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP), psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropology and the sociology of science. Studies of professional communication have traditionally been biased towards the written medium and have been carried out with little, if any, connection to LSP. Disciplinary boundaries and interest groupings have thus kept these different approaches to the study of professional communication and interaction separate. The editors of this volume unite these different perspectives and approaches and bring together recent research from linguistics, sociolinguistics, ethnography of communication, anthropology and sociology to provide an up-to-date analysis of different varieties of professional discourse and their historical development. Chapters written by leading exponents in the field deal with the core theoretical issue of how language, written genres and spoken discourse are constructed as a successive and continuous interplay between language and social realities. The volume includes chapters on the moral construction of discourse in the social care profession, the discourse of dispute negotiation, narrative accounts in clinical research, doctor-patient interaction, legal and other kinds of institutional discourse.A key text for students of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics at both advanced, undergraduate and MA levels.
Construction Zone: Building Scaffolds for Readers and Writers
by Terry ThompsonInstructional scaffolding is an essential part of teaching literacy. But what is scaffolding exactly? What does it look like in a classroom, and how can we improve the ways we use it? Despite its prominence in the repertoire of teaching strategies, scaffolding remains a vague concept for many teachers. ' In essence, scaffolding is the idea of supporting students as they build independence. In The Construction Zone: Building Scaffolding for Readers and Writers, Terry Thompson identifies four critical processes to deepen your understanding and improve your practice of instructional scaffolding: ·' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' Finding and maintaining a specific focus ·' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' Practicing flexibility in planning and delivering instruction ·' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' Giving constructive feedback in response to student efforts ·' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' Monitoring to ensure that students are working at optimal levels of responsibility Thompson' encourages teachers to enhance their use of the traditional gradual release process through five actionable steps: show, share, support, sustain, and survey, and in doing so provides procedures and techniques to help them establish and maintain strong scaffolds throughout the instructional day. The Construction Zone is written from the teacher's perspective and urges educators to fully embrace their role in the scaffolding process while staying mindful of the effect it has on students. ' Taking a student from dependence upon the teacher to independent learning is what teaching is all about, and instructional scaffolding is key to accomplishing this goal. Regardless of where you are in your understanding of instructional scaffolding, The Construction Zone will raise your level of awareness around your instructional practices and the ways you scaffold students to independence.' '
Constructional and Cognitive Explorations of Contrastive Linguistics
by Annalisa Baicchi Cristiano BrocciasThis book approaches the field of contrastive linguistics from a comparative and robust perspective that combines the tenets of construction grammar and cognitive linguistics. In doing so, it shows how their integration can help to successfully enhance research on contrastivity, by means of updated theoretical frameworks and applied methodologies that combine language and thought. It compares ten different languages and offers analyses of constructions at all levels of the linguistic organization, identifying the cognitive motivations that instantiate the linguistic data retrieved from corpora. Relevant to both cognitive and non-cognitive linguists interested in variation and contrastive approaches, as well as graduate students in these areas, this book makes a significant contribution to existing work on the various types of constructional and discourse-based phenomena in modern languages.
A Constructional Approach to Interpersonal Metaphor of Modality (Peking University Linguistics Research #7)
by Jian HuThis book is a current and comprehensive study that incorporates constructional frameworks to inquire grammatical metaphor of modality (MM) for more adequate description and explanation of grammatical metaphor. It conducts semantic analysis of MM via a refined cognitive model and investigation of its lexicogrammatical forms from corpus-based constructional approach. The result is a reliable and systemic record of MM in real use, coupled with theoretical refinement from a cognitive perspective to illuminate its ‘metaphoricity’ motivation. The constructional approach and methodology exemplified in this book provide fresh insights, rich data, and a feasible solution for the adequate description and explanation of grammatical metaphor phenomena and the form-meaning interactive complexity in modality.
Constructional Change in English: Developments in Allomorphy, Word Formation, and Syntax
by Martin HilpertMartin Hilpert combines construction grammar and advanced corpus-based methodology into a new way of studying language change. Constructions are generalizations over remembered exemplars of language use. These exemplars are stored with all their formal and functional properties, yielding constructional generalizations that contain many parameters of variation. Over time, as patterns of language use are changing, the generalizations are changing with them. This book illustrates the workings of constructional change with three corpus-based studies that reveal patterns of change at several levels of linguistic structure, ranging from allomorphy to word formation and to syntax. Taken together, the results strongly motivate the use of construction grammar in research on diachronic language change. This new perspective has wide-ranging consequences for the way historical linguists think about language change. It will be of particular interest to linguists working on morpho-syntax, sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics.
Constructionist Approaches: Past, Present, Future (Elements in Construction Grammar)
by Tobias Ungerer Stefan HartmannConstruction Grammar (CxG) has developed into a broad and highly diverse family of approaches that have in common that they see constructions, i.e. form-meaning pairs at various levels of abstraction and complexity, as the basic units of language. This Element gives an overview of the origin and the current state of the art of constructionist approaches, focusing, on the one hand, on basic concepts like the notion of 'constructions', while at the same time offering an in-depth discussion of current research trends and open questions. It discusses the commonalities and differences between the major constructionist approaches, the organization of constructional networks as well as ongoing research on linguistic creativity, multimodality and individual differences. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Constructions of Agency in American Literature on the War of Independence: War as Action, 1775-1860 (Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature)
by Martin HoltzThis book argues that the negotiation of agency is central not only to the experience of war but also to its representation in cultural expressions, ranging from a notion of disablement, expressed in victimization, immobilization, traumatization, and death, to enablement, expressed in the perpetration of heroic, courageous, skillful, and powerful actions of assertion and dominance. In order to illustrate this thesis, it provides a comprehensive analysis of literary representations of the American War of Independence from 1775, the beginning of the war, up until roughly 1860, when the Civil War marked a decisive historical turning point. As the first national war, it has an unquestionably exemplary status for the development of American conceptions of war. The in-depth study of exemplary texts from a variety of genres and by authors like Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Sedgwick, William Gilmore Simms, and Herman Melville, demonstrates that the overall character of Revolutionary War literature presents the war as a forum in which collective and individual agency is expressed, defended, and cultivated. It uses the military environment in order to teach the values of discipline and self-subordination to a communal good, which are perceived as basic principles of a Republican virtue to guide the actions of the autonomous individual in a popular democracy.
Constructions of Childhood and Youth in Old French Narrative
by Phyllis GaffneyWhat do we know of medieval childhood? Were boundaries always clear between childhood and young adulthood? Was medieval childhood gendered? Scholars have been debating such questions over half a century. Can evidence from imaginative literature test the conclusions of historians? Phyllis Gaffney's innovative book reveals contrast and change in the portrayal of childhood and youth by looking at vernacular French narratives composed between 1100 and 1220. Covering over sixty poems from two major genres - epic and romance - she traces a significant evolution. While early epics contain only a few stereotypical images of the child, later verse narratives display a range of arguably timeless motifs, as well as a growing awareness of the special characteristics of youth. Whereas juvenile epic heroes contribute to the adult agenda by displaying precocious strength and wisdom, romance children are on the receiving end, requiring guidance and education. Gaffney also profiles the intriguing phenomenon of enfances poems, singing the youthful deeds of established heroes: these 'prequels' combine epic and romance features in distinctive ways. Approaching the history of childhood and youth through the lens of literary genre, this study shows how imaginative texts can both shape and reflect the historical development and cultural construction of emotional values.