Sociolinguistics Books

Book SynopsisEven before its usage to mean “a female canine,” bitch didn’t refer to women at all—it originated as a gender-neutral word for “genitalia.” A perfectly innocuous word devolving into an insult directed at females is the case for tons more terms, including hussy, which simply meant “housewife”;Trade Review“Amanda Montell has given validation and tools to those of us who have always felt wrong in our guts about the way gender permeates our means of communication and the criticisms often lobbed at women for how we talk. Wordslut is brilliant fun and empowers all women to give ourselves a voice.” — Gaby Dunn, author of Bad with Money “As funny as it is informative, this book will have you laughing out loud while you contemplate the revolutionary power of words. Who knew sociolinguistics could be so damn entertaining? Leave it to a master of language like Amanda Montell to pull off this semantic magic trick.” — Camille Perri, author of The Assistants and When Katie Met Cassidy Grounded in decades of innovative feminist scholarship, full of witty personal stories, and written with the pragmatic aim of disrupting and changing the status quo, this is a humorous and important book for anyone interested in gender equality, wordplay, or fostering precise communication. Just the kind of sharp, relevant scholarship needed to continue to inspire the next generation of feminist thought. — Kirkus Reviews “I get so jazzed about the future of feminism knowing that Amanda Montell’s brilliance is rising up and about to explode worldwide.” — Jill Soloway “As a bitch who says bitch and loves to talk about bitches, this smart and freakishly entertaining book awakens parts of my brain I didn’t know existed while tickling all my foul-mouthed, feminist, word-obsessed fancies. If you’re a human who speaks English and aren’t reading this, then what on earth are you doing.” — Samantha Irby “This feisty, fascinating critique of the English language will make you feel smarter after every paragraph. Amanda Montell’s analyses are sharp and provocative but also funny and accessible. She’s the cool feminist nerd we need.” — Whitney Cummings, creator of 2 Broke Girls “At its heart, this work reflects a tenet of sociolinguistic study: language is not divorced from culture; it both reflects and creates beliefs about identity and power. Modern stylings situated within foundational research will hopefully bring a new audience to the field of language and gender studies.” — Library Journal “Wordslut is filled with fascinating info about the sexist history of our language: I literally said ‘whoa’ multiple times while reading this book. It is so witty and brilliant. Men and women both need to read it.” — Blyth Roberson

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Book SynopsisAn engaging introduction to the study of spoken interaction, this book provides a thorough grounding in the theory and methodology of conversation analysis. It covers data collection, techniques for analysis and practical applications, and guides students through foundational and new research findings on everyday conversations and talk in institutional contexts, from media, business, and education to healthcare and law. Now thoroughly updated to showcase contemporary developments in the field, this second edition includes: New chapters on interaction in psychotherapy, educational settings and language learning and teaching Expanded coverage of doctor-patient communications, customer service and business meetings workplace interviews and online interactions, including social media, video gaming and livestreams A wider variety of research on other languages, including French, German, Italian, Finnish, Swedish, Arabic, Korean, Chinese and Japanese Multimodal analyses of interaction,Trade Review[A]n important textbook that engages closely with theoretical and practical aspects of CA. The book is very 'user-friendly' and approaches its subject matter from a straightforward and common sense point of view. No doubt, this book will be of interest to students of sociology, linguistics and communication studies. -- Discourse Studies [of the first edition]A wonderful text with examples of conversation from many activities and relationships. Angela Cora Garcia displays just how fascinating ordinary talk is. -- Karen Tracy, University of Colorado, USAThis second edition ofAngela Cora Garcia’s excellent An Introduction to Interaction includes brand new chapters and showcases the latest developments in the field of conversation analysis, especially in the analysis of online interaction and social media. This makes the book both an essential and comprehensive introduction to the method of conversation analysis but also its many important contemporary applications. -- Elizabeth Stokoe, Loughborough University, UKTable of ContentsPart I: Theory, Method and Data for Conversation Analysis 1. Introduction to the Study of Conversation Analysis 2. Understanding Ethnomethodology 3. Understanding and Doing Conversation Analysis: Methodological Approach 4. Preparing the Data: Transcription Practices Part II: How Talk Works: The Social Organization of Human Action 5. The Turn-Taking System 6. Adjacency Pairs, Preference Organization, and Assessments 7. Sequential Organization: Interrogative Series, Insertion Sequences, and Pre-Sequences 8. Openings 9. Closings 10. Error Avoidance and Repair 11. Creating Topical Coherence 12. Referring to Persons: Membership Categorization and Identity Work Part III: Technologically Mediated Interaction: Work Done Through and with Technology 13. Routine Service Calls: Emergency Calls to the Police 14. Problematic Emergency Service Calls 15. Mobile Phones, Computer-Mediated and Online Interaction Part IV: Talk in Medical Settings 16. Doctor/Patient Communication 17. Counselling and Psychotherapy Part V: Education and Foreign Language Learning 18. Interaction in Educational Settings 19. Teaching and Learning Languages and Second Languages Part VI: Talk in Legal Settings 20.Trials and Other Public Legal Proceedings 21. Behind the Scenes Legal Procedures: Doing Interrogations, Traffic Stops and Other Police Work 22. Talk in Mediation Sessions Part VII: Talk in Broadcast and Online Media 23. Television News Interviews and Online News Media 24. Call-in Radio Talk Shows, Blogs, Livestreams, and Podcasts Part VIII: Talk in Business Settings 25. Doing Customer Service, Client Contacts and Sales 26. Talk in Business Contexts: Meetings 27. Talk in Business Contexts: Interviews 28. Conclusions References Index

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Book SynopsisA collection of essays about language and its constructive role in national culture, history, and identity, that advocates for linguistic decolonization.Trade ReviewMany of the ideas are familiar from Ngugi's earlier critical books, and earlier lectures, elsewhere. But the material here has a new context and the ideas a new focus. This leading African writer presents the arguments for using African language and forms after successfully using an African language himself. - -- Anne Walmsley * THE GUARDIAN *... after 25 years of independence, there is beginning to emerge a generation of writers for whom colonialism is a matter of history and not of direct personal experience. In retrospect that literature characterised by Ngugi as Afro-European - the literature written by Africans in European languages - will come to be seen as part and parcel of the uneasy period between colonialism and full independence, a period equally reflected in the continent's political instability as it attempts to find its feet. Ngugi's importance - and that of this book - lies in the courage with which he has confronted this most urgent of issues. - -- Adewale Maja-Pearce * THE NEW STATESMAN *Ngũgĩ's is a many splendored book. It is the personal testimony of an author who has fought a long battle of his own to undo the colonization of his mind. At the same time the book presents a historical analysis of subversion of personal identities and cultures of the colonized peoples in the process of colonization. It is also a book on the historical development of orature and literature in Africa. Finally, it is an essay in literary theory and criticism on the role of the artist in society. Ngũgĩ writes about Africa, his analysis applies to all of the Third World. -- African Studies Review

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Book SynopsisThis book tells the fascinating stories behind 100 everyday words that have been influenced by writing, reading and publishing books.

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Book SynopsisA classic historical excursion through the English language.

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Book SynopsisRoss Perlin is a linguist, writer and translator. He has written for the New York Times, the Guardian, Harper's and n+1 and the Endangered Language Alliance has been covered by the New York Times, the New Yorker, BBC, NPR and many others. He is also the author of Intern Nation.

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Book SynopsisCombining the main findings, methods and analytic techniques of this central approach to language and social interaction, along with real-life examples and step-by-step explanations, Conversation Analysis is the ideal student guide to the field. Introduces the main findings, methods and analytic techniques of conversation analysis (CA) a growing interdisciplinary field exploring language and social interaction Provides an engaging historical overview of the field, along with detailed coverage of the key findings in each area of CA and a guide to current research Examines the way talk is composed, and how conversation structures highlight aspects of human behavior Focuses on the most important domains of organization in conversation, including turn-taking, action sequencing, repair, stories, openings and closings, and the effect of context Includes real-life examples and step-by-step explanations, making it an ideal guide for studentTrade Review“Overall, I was very favorably impressed by Conversation Analysis: An Introduction . . . n its own terms, I particularly liked the straightforward, accessible style that Sidnell uses to discuss complex ideas and materials.” (Journal of Sociolinguistics, 1 February 2013) “To conclude, this introduction is a rich source of authentic examples and will serve interested students and scholars very well.” (Discourse and Communication, 1 November 2012) "The interdisciplinary research method and field of conversation analysis (CA) is remarkably well-suited to helping teachers achieve this objective, because CA provides tools that enable first the perception, and then the scientific description and analysis of regular patterns of human social conduct - patterns that organize, and make meaningful, the world of everyday life." (Language in Society, 2011)Table of ContentsAcknowledgements vii Transcription Conventions ix 1 Talk 1 2 Methods 20 3 Turn-Taking 36 4 Action and Understanding 59 5 Preference 77 6 Sequence 95 7 Repair 110 8 Turn Construction 139 9 Stories 174 10 Openings and Closings 197 11 Topic 223 12 Context 245 13 Conclusion 258 References 271 Index 281

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Book SynopsisThis work presents a concise account of the history of the English language, from the point of view of current theories of language variation and change. It provides a socio-historical background for each period, followed by a discussion of its major linguistic developments.Trade Review"[Fennell] gives an excellent account of the global spread of modern English." Times Higher Education Supplement "Offers an excellent background in the history of the world's second language." GeolinguisticsTable of ContentsList of Maps and Figures xii Acknowledgements xiii 1 Introduction 1 1.1 The Time Periods of English 1 1.2 Language Change 3 1.3 Sources of Information on Language Change 7 1.4 Linguistic Preliminaries 9 1.5 The Sounds of English, and Symbols Used to Describe Them 11 1.5.1 Consonants 11 1.5.2 Vowels 12 1.5.2.1 Monophthongs 12 1.5.2.2 Diphthongs 12 1.6 Structure of the Book 13 2 The Pre-history of English 15 Timeline: The Indo-European Period 15 2.1 The Indo-European Languages and Linguistic Relatedness 17 2.1.1 The Beginnings 17 2.1.2 The Development of Historical Linguistics 18 2.1.3 Genetic Relatedness 19 2.2 Linguistic Developments: The Indo-European Language Family 23 2.2.1 Family-Tree Relationships 23 2.2.2 The Indo-European Family 23 2.2.2.1 Indo-Iranian 25 2.2.2.2 Armenian 26 2.2.2.3 Albanian 26 2.2.2.4 Balto-Slavonic 26 2.2.2.5 Hellenic 28 2.2.2.6 Italic 28 2.2.2.7 Celtic 29 2.2.2.8 Germanic 31 2.3 From Indo-European to Germanic 34 2.3.1 Prosody 35 2.3.2 The Consonant System: Sound Shifts 35 2.3.2.1 Grimm’s Law 36 2.3.2.2 Verner’s Law 37 2.3.2.3 The Second Consonant Shift 38 2.3.3 The Vowel System 40 2.3.4 Morphology 40 2.3.5 Syntax 41 2.3.6 Lexicon 41 2.3.7 Semantics 42 2.3.8 Indo-European/Germanic Texts 42 2.3.9 Neogrammarians, Structuralists and Contemporary Linguistic Models 43 2.4 Typological Classification 44 2.4.1 Universals 45 2.4.1.1 Syntactic Universals 45 2.4.2 Morphological Typology 46 2.5 Sociolinguistic Focus. The Indo-European Tribes and the Spread of Language. Language Contact and Language Change. Archaeological Linguistics 49 2.5.1 Language Contact 50 2.5.2 Archaeological Linguistics 51 2.6 Conclusion 53 3 Old English 55 Timeline: The Old English Period 55 3.1 Social and Political History 55 3.1.1 Britain before the English 55 3.1.2 The Anglo-Saxon Invasions 56 3.1.3 Anglo-Saxon Influence 56 3.1.4 Scandinavian Influence 57 3.2 Linguistic Developments: The Sounds, Structure and Typology of Old English 59 3.2.1 The Structure of Old English 59 3.2.1.1 OE Consonants 60 3.2.1.2 Vowels: from Germanic to Old English 62 3.2.1.3 Old English Gender 64 3.2.1.4Inflection in Old English 64 3.2.1.5 Old English Syntax 72 3.2.1.6 Old English Vocabulary 77 3.3 Linguistic and Literary Achievements 79 3.3.1 Texts 79 3.3.1.1 Prose 80 3.3.1.2 Poetry 82 3.4 The Dialects of Old English 85 3.5 Sociolinguistic Focus 86 3.5.1 Language Contact 86 3.5.1.1 Latin and Celtic 88 3.5.1.2 The Scandinavians 90 4 Middle English 94 Timeline: The Middle English Period 94 4.1 Social and Political History 94 4.1.1 Political History: The Norman Conquest to Edward I 94 4.1.2 Social History 96 4.1.2.1 The Establishment of Towns and Burghs and the Beginnings of Social Stratification 96 4.2 Linguistic Developments: Middle English Sounds and Structure, with Particular Emphasis on the Breakdown of the Inflectional System and its Linguistic Typological Implications 97 4.2.1 Major Changes in the Sound System 97 4.2.1.1 The Consonants 97 4.2.1.2 Consonant Changes from Old to Middle English 98 4.2.1.3 Vowels in Stressed Syllables 98 4.2.1.4 Vowels in Unstressed Syllables 99 4.2.1.5 Lengthening and Shortening 99 4.2.1.6 Summary Table of Vowel Changes from Old to Middle English 100 4.2.1.7 The Formation of Middle English Diphthongs 100 4.2.2 Major Morphological Changes from Old to Middle English 101 4.2.2.1 Loss of Inflections 101 4.2.2.2 Other Changes in the Morphological System 102 4.2.2.3 Verbs 103 4.2.3 Middle English Syntax 104 4.2.3.1 Word Order 106 4.2.4 The Lexicon: Loan Words from French 106 4.2.4.1 Numbers and Parts of the Body 107 4.2.4.2 Two French Sources 108 4.3 Middle English Dialects 108 4.3.1 Linguistic and Literary Achievements 114 4.3.1.1 Middle English Literature 114 4.3.2 Language 114 4.3.3 Genre 115 4.4 Sociolinguistic Focus: Social Stratification, Multilingualism and Dialect Variation. Language Contact: The Myth of Middle English Creolization 116 4.4.1 English Re-established 116 4.4.1.1 Language and the Rise of the Middle Class 120 4.4.2 The Development of Standard English 122 4.4.2.1 The Evolution of ME ‘Standard’ English 123 4.4.3 Middle English Creolization: Myth? 125 4.4.3.1 Definitions 126 4.4.3.2 Pidgins and Creoles in England? 128 4.5 Conclusion 133 5 Early Modern English 135 Timeline: The Early Modern English Period 135 5.1 Social and Political History 136 5.1.1 Historical and Political Background 136 5.1.1.1 Internal Instability and Colonial Expansion 137 5.2 Linguistic Developments: The Variable Character of Early Modern English 138 5.2.1 Phonology 138 5.2.1.1 Consonants 139 5.2.1.2 Vowels 140 5.2.1.3 The Great Vowel Shift 141 5.2.2 Morphology 141 5.2.2.1 Nouns 141 5.2.2.2 Pronouns 142 5.2.2.3 Adjectives and Adverbs 142 5.2.2.4 Verbs 143 5.2.2.5 The Spread of Northern Forms 143 5.2.3 Syntax 144 5.2.3.1 Periphrastic do 144 5.2.3.2 Progressive Verb Forms 145 5.2.3.3 Passives 145 5.2.4 Sample Text 146 5.2.5 Vocabulary 147 5.2.6 The Anxious State of English: The Search for Authority 147 5.2.6.1 Dictionaries and the Question of Linguistic Authority: Swift’s and Johnson’s View of Language 149 5.3 Linguistic and Literary Achievement 152 5.4 Sociolinguistic Focus 154 5.4.1 Variation in Early Modern English 154 5.4.2 Standardization 156 5.4.2.1 The Printing Press 156 5.4.2.2 The Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation 156 5.4.2.3 English Established 157 5.4.3 The Great Vowel Shift 158 5.4.3.1 Phonological Change 158 5.4.4 Case Study: Power and Solidarity Relations in Early Modern English 162 5.5 Conclusion 166 6 Present-Day English 167 Timeline: Present-Day English 167 Introduction 168 6.1 Social and Political History 169 6.1.1 The Age of Revolutions, Wars and Imperialism 169 6.1.2 Urbanization, Industrialization and Social Stratification 170 6.2 Linguistic Developments 172 6.2.1 Morphology and Syntax 172 6.2.1.1 Morphology 172 6.2.1.2 Syntax 173 6.2.2 The Lexicon 175 6.2.2.1 Colonialism, Contact and Borrowings 175 6.2.2.2 Neologisms 176 6.2.2.3 Illustrative Texts 178 6.3 Modern English Dialects 179 6.3.1 Traditional Dialects 180 6.3.2 Modern Dialects 182 6.3.3 Received Pronunciation (RP): The Social Background 185 6.3.3.1 Characteristics of RP 187 6.3.4 RP, Estuary English and ‘the Queen’s English’ 188 6.4 Sociolinguistic Focus: English in Scotland, Ireland and Wales – Multilingualism in Britain 191 6.4.1 English in the British Isles 191 6.4.1.1 English in Scotland 191 6.4.1.2 English in Wales 195 6.4.1.3 English in Ireland 198 6.4.2 Immigrant Varieties of English in Britain 200 6.4.2.1 Immigration to Britain in the PDE Period 200 6.4.2.2 Colonial Immigration and Language 202 7 English in the United States 208 Timeline: America in the Modern Period 208 7.1 Social and Political History 209 7.1.1 Settlement and Language 209 7.1.2 Settlement by Region 210 7.1.2.1 The Original Thirteen Colonies 210 7.1.2.2 The Middle West 213 7.1.2.3 The South and West 214 7.2 The Development of American English 216 7.2.1 The Strength and Maintenance of Dialect Boundaries 216 7.2.2 How, Why and When American English Began to Diverge from British English 217 7.2.2.1 Physical Separation 217 7.2.2.2 The Different Physical Conditions Encountered by the Settlers 218 7.2.2.3 Contact with Immigrant Non-Native Speakers of English 219 7.2.2.4 Developing Political Differences and the Growing American Sense of National Identity 219 7.3 Language Variation in the United States 222 7.3.1 Uniformity and Diversity in Early American English 222 7.3.2 Regional Dialect Divisions in American English 223 7.3.2.1 The Lexicon 223 7.3.2.2 Phonology: Consonants 226 7.3.2.3 Phonology: Vowels 227 7.3.3 Social and Ethnic Dialects 229 7.3.3.1 Social Class and Language Change 231 7.3.3.2 Ethnicity 231 7.3.3.3 African-American Vernacular English 232 7.3.3.4 Traditional Dialects and the Resistance to Change 237 8 World-Wide English 241 Timeline: World-Wide English 241 8.1 Social and Political History: The Spread of English across the Globe 243 8.1.1 British Colonialism 244 8.1.1.1 Canada 244 8.1.1.2 The Caribbean 245 8.1.1.3 Australia 246 8.1.1.4New Zealand 247 8.1.1.5 South Africa 247 8.1.1.6 South Asia 248 8.1.1.7 Former Colonial Africa: West Africa 250 8.1.1.8 East Africa 252 8.1.1.9 South-East Asia and South Pacific 253 8.1.2 An Overview of the Use of English throughout the World 255 8.2 English as a Global Language 256 8.2.1 The Industrial Revolution 256 8.2.2 American Economic Superiority and Political Leadership 257 8.2.3 American Technological Domination 257 8.2.4 The Boom in English Language Teaching 258 8.2.5 The Need for a Global Language 259 8.2.6 Structural Considerations 260 8.2.7 Global and at the Same Time Local 261 8.3 English as a Killer Language 264 8.3.1 Language Death 265 8.3.2 Language and Communication Technology 266 8.4 The Future of English 267 Bibliography 270 Index 280

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Book SynopsisIn Reading Between the Signs, Anna Mindess provides a perspective on a culture that is not widely understood - American Deaf culture. With the collaboration of three distinguished Deaf consultants, Mindess explores the implications of cultural differences at the intersection of the Deaf and hearing worlds. Used in sign language interpreter training programs worldwide, Reading Between the Signs is a resource for students, working interpreters and other professionals. This important new edition retains practical techniques that enable interpreters to effectively communicate their clients' intent, while its timely discussion of the interpreter's role is broadened in a cultural context. NEW TO THIS EDITION: New chapter explores the changing landscape of the interpreting field and discusses the concepts of Deafhood and Deaf heart. This examination of using Deaf interpreters pays respect to the profession, details techniques and shows the benefits of collaboration.Trade ReviewA dazzling application of the tools of intercultural communication that illuminates Deaf and hearing cultures and their differences . . . This is a book for everyone interested in Deaf culture. -- Harlan Lane, Author of The Mask of BenevolenceReading Between the Signs, Third Edition, adds a terrific new chapter about Deaf heart and the tradition of Deaf interpreters, and includes the reflections of several Deaf interpreters on their experiences working with Deaf consumers, detailing ways we utilize cultural adjustments for more effective communication. -- Linda Bove, Certified Deaf Interpreter, Actress, ConsultantA must-read! An enlightening book . . . a defining document in the literature of Deaf culture. -- Eileen Forestal, Professor, ASL Studies / Interpreting Training, Union County CollegeEssential reading for anyone working with Deaf people or seeking a greater understanding of communication between Deaf and hearing culture. * Ai-Media *

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Book Synopsis‘The first and perhaps only book on the relative merits of American and British English that is dominated by facts and analysis rather than nationalistic prejudice. For all its scholarship, this is also a funny and rollicking read.’ The Economist, Books of the Year Only an American would call autumn fall or refer to a perfectly good pavement as a sidewalk… Not so, says Lynne Murphy. The English invented sidewalk in the seventeenth century and in 1693 John Dryden wrote the line, ‘Or how last fall he raised the weekly bills.’ Perhaps we don’t know our own language quite as well as we thought. Murphy, an American linguist in Britain, dissects the myths surrounding British and American English in a laugh-out-loud exploration of how language works and where it's going.Trade Review‘The first and perhaps only book on the relative merits of American and British English that is dominated by facts and analysis rather than nationalistic prejudice. For all its scholarship, this is also a funny and rollicking read.’ * The Economist, Books of the Year *‘[Murphy’s] delivery is sparkling, her approach mischievous, her material brightened by the unexpected…a potpourri of enchanting, counterintuitive surprises…The Prodigal Tongue is playful, funny, smart and often humbling…Murphy’s prose is beguiling, and sprinkled with sprightly quotations...before the apocalypse, you could do worse than read Lynne Murphy’s delightful book.’ * Times Literary Supplement *‘Witty and erudite...what lifts The Prodigal Tongue is Murphy’s deep learning, lightly worn, in linguistics and linguistic history...fascinating.’ * Financial Times *‘A fun, practical and intelligent book which reminds us it’s OK to say tomato both ways.’ * The American, Books of the Year *‘Murphy ranges far and wide, with much wonderful detail and colour. She is particularly good on sport, manners, class and death, and her observations on food are fascinating.’ * The Times *‘Murphy’s book is pedantic, but for once the definition is positive: she gets things right, offers proof and skewers inaccuracy, and does so with wit and erudition.’ * Daily Telegraph *‘A fascinating book.’ * SORTED Magazine *‘Delightful… Murphy’s great love for language radiates from these pages… Her examples are often funny and always apt…[her] book serves as an open-minded argument for tolerance and understanding.’ * New York Times Book Review *‘Entertaining and sometimes gleeful…The Prodigal Tongue is ultimately a celebration of the richness and diversity of English.’ * New Statesman *‘Fascinating and surprising…a witty and erudite celebration of the English language.’ * i *‘Murphy has an amusing facility for zapping tired language myths… But the most striking feature of her writing is a fascination with the quirks of usage. She succeeds in her ambition to increase “our enjoyment of our common language and our pride in it”.’ * Wall Street Journal *‘The engaging, thoughtful and humorous approach makes for a readable and informative experience.’ * Irish Times *‘[Murphy] writes with wit and flair, wearing her erudition lightly…a swell read.’ * The Arts Desk *‘I love this book. Sassy but balanced, authoritative but fun: this is a must for anyone who fears that English is going to the American dogs.’ -- Susie Dent, Countdown’s resident lexicographer and author of Dent’s Modern Tribes‘Finally, this emotional topic gets the hilarious, myth-demolishing and stereotype-smashing take it needed. As an American in London I couldn't stop talking about it with everyone I met.’ -- Lane Greene, author of You Are What You Speak‘The Prodigal Tongue is great fun – impeccably researched and outright funny at the same time… Murphy is one smart cookie, or should I say biscuit?’ -- Patricia T. O’Conner, author of Woe Is I‘The war of words waged between Americans and Brits has been filled with dour pedantry on both sides – which is what makes Murphy’s book such a welcome and refreshing revelation… With wit and expertise, The Prodigal Tongue calls all English speakers home to a language big enough for both fries and chips, bumbershoots and brollies.’ -- Kory Stamper, author of Word by Word‘No one knows how to navigate the transatlantic language divide better than Lynne Murphy. Moving beyond facile stereotypes about British and American English, she delves into subtle linguistic nuances with wit and aplomb. The Prodigal Tongue is a wonderful reading experience for anyone interested in understanding the true nature of these two distinct “nationlects”.’ -- Ben Zimmer, language columnist for The Wall Street Journal‘Forget the usual bumbershoots and lifts and lorries – Lynne Murphy’s book on the difference between English in America and English in England is full of much more interesting things… You'll be chuffed as nuts on every page.’ -- John McWhorter, author of Words On the Move and Talking Back, Talking Black

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Book SynopsisThe extraordinary historical consequences of errors and fictional inventions.SERENDIPITIES is an iconoclastic, dazzlingly erudite and witty demonstration, by one of the world''s most brilliant thinkers, of how myths and lunacies can produce historical developments of no small significance. In Eco''s words, ''even errors can produce interesting side effects''. Eco''s book shows how:-- believers in a flat earth helped Columbus accidentally discover America-- the medieval myth of Prester John, the Christian king in Asia, assisted the European drive eastward-- the myth of the Rosicrucians affected the Masons, leading in turn to the widespread belief in a Jewish masonic plot to dominate the world and other forms of paranoid anti-Semitism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

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Book SynopsisThe Syntax and Semantics of the Perfect Active in Literary Koine Greek incorporates linguistic insights from both neo-Davidsonian and Chomskyan traditions to present a unified semantic description of the perfect and pluperfect in literary Koine Greek.Table of ContentsIntroduction 1.1 Problem of the Greek perfect active 1.2 Existing frameworks for understanding the perfect 1.3 Existing frameworks for understanding the Greek perfect 1.4 Critical assessment of existing studies 1.5 Aims and approach 1.6 Corpus 1.7 Outline 2. The perfect and lexical aspect 2.1 Introduction 2.1.1 Events and the Greek perfect 2.1.2 The true domain of events 2.1.3 Aspect: semantic, pragmatic or morphological? 2.1.4 Viewpoint aspect, situation aspect and telicity 2.1.5 Tense and aspect in terms of Utterance Time and Topic Time 2.1.6 Viewpoint aspect in Greek 2.1.7 Lexical aspectual categories: Aristotle, Kenny and Vendler 2.1.8 The domain of situation aspect: syntax or lexis? 2.1.9 Developing a lexical aspectual framework for Greek 2.2 Perfect of homogeneous verbs 2.2.1 Introduction 2.2.2 Non-durative state verbs 2.2.3 Durative state verbs 2.2.4 Terminative state verbs 2.2.5 Non-state homogeneous verbs 2.2.6 Conclusion 2.3 Non-durative terminative verbs (describing achievements) 2.4 Non-homogeneous durative verbs (describing activities and accomplishments) 2.4.1 Introduction 2.4.2 Non-COS verbs 2.4.3 COS verbs 2.4.4 Verbs with two perfect active stems 2.4.5 Verbs alternating between COS and non-COS readings without specialised stems 2.4.6 Conclusion 2.5 Noise verbs 2.6 Conclusion 3. Syntactic theoretical frameworks 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Neo-Davidsonian tradition 3.2.1 Event semantics in the Davidsonian tradition 3.2.2 Argument projection in a neo-Davidsonian framework 3.2.3 Semantic roles and grammatical relations 3.2.4 Determining the number of arguments 3.2.5 Formally representing semantic roles in a neo-Davidsonian framework 3.2.6 Are states predicates of eventualities? 3.2.7 Theme hierarchies and thematic proto-roles 3.3 Government-Binding (GB) theory 3.3.1 Introduction 3.3.2 Unaccusativity hypothesis and (causative) change of state 3.3.3 X-bar theory 3.3.4 Status of the subject as a verbal argument 3.3.5 Subject of state sentences 3.3.6 Combining Davidsonian semantics with GB theory 3.4 Predicate types 3.4.1 Introduction 3.4.2 State predicates 3.4.3 Change of state and causative change of state 3.4.4 Change of state and change of location 3.4.5 Accomplishment predicates 3.4.6 Activity predicates 3.5 Voice alternations and the resultative 3.5.1 Passive voice 3.5.2 Resultative 3.5.3 The middle 3.6 Conclusion 4. The causative alternation 4.1 Introduction 4.1.1 Transitivity in traditional Greek grammar passive 4.1.2 The function and development of the Greek middle and passive 4.1.3 Voice and argument projection in Greek 4.1.4 Transitivity and the Greek perfect 4.2 Labile transitivity outside of the perfect 4.2.1 Introduction 4.2.2 Verbs fully participating in the causative alternation 4.2.3 Anticausative denoted by infl ection 4.2.4 Anticausative perfective with a root stem 4.2.5 Semantic distinction determining participation in the causative alternation 4.2.6 Conclusion 4.3 Labile transitivity in the perfect 4.3.1 Introduction 4.3.2 Causative/anticausative distinctions in the perfect 4.3.3 Re-expression of external cause argument by means of an adjunct phrase 4.3.4 Productivity of the specialised causative/anticausative perfect stems 4.3.5 Implications for the meaning of the perfect 4.4 Conclusion 5. The interaction of the perfect with different predicate types 5.1 Introduction: tense and aspect in a neo-Davidsonian framework 5.1.1 Approach 5.1.2 Aspectual Interface Hypothesis (AIH) 5.1.3 Situation aspect 5.1.4 Tense and aspect in a Government-Binding (GB) and neo- Davidsonian framework 5.1.5 Constructing the path of an event 5.1.6 Role of VAspP 5.1.7 Resultative and perfect in English 5.1.8 Outline of the present chapter 5.2 Homogeneous eventualities 5.2.1 Non-durative predicates 5.2.2 Durative predicates 5.2.3 Conclusion 5.3 Non-homogeneous non-COS eventualities 5.3.1 Introduction 5.3.2 Activity predicates 5.3.3 Accomplishment predicates 5.3.4 Conclusion 5.4 COS accomplishment predicates 5.4.1 Introduction 5.4.2 Unaccusative and anticausative predicates 5.4.3 Causative COS predicates 5.4.4 Unaccusativised activity predicates 5.4.5 Delimiting the post-state 5.5 COS achievement predicates 5.5.1 COS predicates 5.5.2 Causative COS predicates 5.6 Conclusion 6. The interaction of the perfect with COS predicates 6.1 Introduction 6.2 Extent predicates 6.2.1 COS and extent predicates 6.2.2 Achievements in a difference scale framework 6.2.3 Non-COS extent predicates 6.2.4 Disambiguation of extent and temporal readings 6.2.5 Viewpoint aspect and difference scales 6.2.6 Tense and extent predicates 6.2.7 The resultative construction 6.2.8 Extent predicates in Greek 6.2.9 Implications for the semantics of the perfect 6.3 Temporal versus extent readings of perfect predicates 6.3.1 Introduction 6.3.2 Prestate not logically present in time 6.3.3 Prestate logically present in time 6.3.4 Metaphorical extension of extent predicates to non-distance scales 6.4 Suppression of the internal argument in non-causative COS predicates 6.5 Suppression of the external argument 6.6 A special case 6.7 Conclusion 7. Deriving homogeneous atelic eventualities from states and non-states 7.1 Introduction 7.2 Deriving a homogeneous atelic eventuality by negation 7.3 Telic state predicates 7.4 Activity predicates 7.5 Non-COS accomplishment predicates 7.6 Causative COS predicates 7.7 Deriving states from states: the perfect of atelic state predicates 7.7.1 Introduction 7.7.2 Pure state predicates 7.7.3 Continued state predicates 7.7.4 COS predicates 7.8 Obligatory anteriority in derived states 7.9 Semantic contribution of the Greek perfect 7.10 Tense and the time adverbial problem 7.11 Noise predicates 7.12 Conclusion 8. Conclusion: the semantics of the Greek perfect

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Book Synopsis"Guy Deutscher is that rare beast, an academic who talks good sense about linguistics... he argues in a playful and provocative way, that our mother tongue does indeed affect how we think and, just as important, how we perceive the world." Observer *Does language reflect the culture of a society? *Is our mother-tongue a lens through which we perceive the world? *Can different languages lead their speakers to different thoughts? In Through the Language Glass, acclaimed author Guy Deutscher will convince you that, contrary to the fashionable academic consensus of today, the answer to all these questions is - yes. A delightful amalgam of cultural history and popular science, this book explores some of the most fascinating and controversial questions about language, culture and the human mind.Trade ReviewJaw-droppingly wonderful ... A marvellous and surprising book which left me breathless and dizzy with delight. The ironic, playful tone at the beginning gradates into something serious that is never pompous, intellectually and historically complex and yet always pellucidly laid out. Plus I learned the word plaidoyer which I shall do my utmost to use every day * Stephen Fry *Fabulously interesting ... a remarkably rich, provocative and intelligent work of pop science * Sunday Times *Brilliant [and] beautifully written * Financial Times *So robustly researched and wonderfully told that it is hard to put down * New Scientist *A delight to read * Spectator *

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Book SynopsisWhether all human languages are fundamentally the same or different has been a subject of debate for ages. This problem has deep philosophical implications: If languages are all the same, it implies a fundamental commonality- and thus mutual intelligibility- of human thought.We are now on the verge of solving this problem. Using a twenty-year-old theory proposed by the world''s greatest living linguist, Noam Chomsky, researchers have found that the similarities among languages are more profound than the differences. Languages whose grammars seem completely incompatible may in fact be structurally almost identical, except for a difference in one simple rule. The discovery of these rules and how they may vary promises to yield a linguistic equivalent of the Periodic Table of the Elements: a single framework by which we can understand the fundamental structure of all human language. This is a landmark breakthrough both within linguistics, which will herewith finally become a full-fledged

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Book SynopsisNice White Anglophones: Privilege, Power and Monolingualism is an innovative work exploring race, power and ideology via an extended fictional case study centring a monolingual white American familyââœThe Smithsâ. The reader is invited to follow this seemingly âœnormalâ white English-speaking family through their everyday life and think critically about their linguistic and cultural reality, what they do and, especially, what they do not do.What role does monolingual whiteness play in socioeconomics and politics? How do participants in language and culture reinforce dynamics that afford privilege and power to some and exclude others? And how does white monolingualism contribute to the ensmalling our cultural horizons? These themes are introduced through stories and explored in-depth through critical discussion questions, providing comprehensive coverage of monolingualism, race and power in a new and engrossing way.This intersectional workâpart textbook, part case study, part dialogue and critical inquiry, is a new and original way to engage students and scholars of language and culture, power and race, as well as anyone interested in monolinguality and languaculture.

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Book SynopsisPlain Language: A Psycholinguistic Approach employs principles from the field of psycholinguistics to explore factors that make a sentence or text easy or difficult to process by the cognitive mechanisms that support language processing, and describes how levels of difficulty might function within bureaucratic power structures.Drawing from experimental data on readability, the author employs a metaphor of three ghost readers in the mind that exist and interact with each other: the syntactic reader (the one searching for the structure), the statistical reader (the one driven by previous experiences), and finally the pragmatic reader (the one searching for meaning). The penultimate chapter concerns a novel psycholinguistic experiment showing that complexly written texts may prevent adult citizens with average literacy skills from accessing important information related to their health, work, and right to representation, thereby drawing a line between the psycholinguistics of language comprehension and the maintenance of existing power structures.Written in plain language itself, this book is designed to be easily understandable from an undergraduate level and makes for fascinating reading for all students and researchers in linguistics and psycholinguistics, as well as supplementary reading for students of sociolinguistics and related modules. Students, researchers, and interested general readers will develop an understanding that knowing how the mind reads and understands language can help stakeholders to ensure equal access to information and democratic processes.

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Book SynopsisIn this book, Aidan Doyle traces the history of the Irish language from the time of the Norman invasion at the end of the 12th century to independence in 1922, combining political, cultural, and linguistic history. The book is divided into seven main chapters that focus on a specific period in the history of the language; they each begin with a discussion of the external history and position of the Irish language in the period, before moving on to investigate the important internal changes that took place at that time. A History of the Irish Language makes available for the first time material that has previously been inaccessible to students and scholars who cannot read Irish, and will be a valuable resource not only for undergraduate students of the language, but for all those interested in Irish history and culture.Trade Reviewthe historiography of the Irish language is vibrant at the moment, and Aidan Doyle has made a very constructive contribution to it. * Niall Ó Ciosáin, Historical Sociolinguistics *Table of Contents1. Introduction ; 2. The Anglo-Normans and their heritage (1200-1500) ; 3. The Tudors (1500-1600) ; 4. The Stuarts (1600-1700) ; 5. Two Irelands, two languages (1700-1800) ; 6. A new language for a new nation (1800-1870) ; 7. Revival (1870-1922) ; 8. The modernization of Irish (1870-1922) ; 9. Conclusion ; Glossary ; References ; Index

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Book SynopsisWith the growing influence of discursive and narrative perspectives on organizing, organizational scholars are focusing increasing attention on the constitutive role that language and communication play in organizational processes. This view conceptualizes language and communication as bringing organization into being in every instant and is therefore inherently sympathetic to a process perspective. However, our understanding of the role of language in unfolding organizational processes and as a part of organizational action is still limited. This volume brings together empirical and/or conceptual contributions from leading scholars in organization and communication to develop understanding of language and communication as constitutive of work, and also analyze how language and communication actually work to achieve influence in the context of organizations. It aims to elucidate the role language, communication, and narrativity play as part of strategic and institutional work in and arTrade ReviewPerspectives on Process Organization Studies will be the definitive annual volume of theories and research that advance our understanding of process questions dealing with how things emerge, grow, develop, and terminate over time. I applaud Professors Ann Langley and Haridimos Tsoukas for launching this important book series, and encourage colleagues to submit their process research and subscribe to PROS. * Andrew H. Van de Ven, Vernon H. Heath Professor of Organizational Innovation and Change, University of Minnesota, USA *The recent decades witnessed conspicuous changes in organization theory: a slow but inexorable shift from the focus on structures to the focus on processes. The whirlwinds of the global economy made it clear that everything flows, even if change itself can become stable. While the interest in processes of organizing is not new, it is now acquiring a distinct presence, as more and more voices join in. A forum is therefore needed where such voices can speak to one another, and to the interested readers. The series Perspectives on Process Organization Studies will provide an excellent forum of that kind, both for those for whom a processual perspective is a matter of ontology, and those who see it as an epistemological choice. * Barbara Czarniawska, Professor of Management Studies, School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden *Table of ContentsPART I: LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION IN ORGANIZATIONS; PART II: PROCESS PERSPECTIVES

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Book SynopsisSome people say scohn, while others say schown.He says bath, while she says bahth.You say potayto. I say potahtoAnd--wait a second, no one says potahto. No one's ever said potahto. Have they?From reconstructing Shakespeare's accent to the rise and fall of Received Pronunciation, actor Ben Crystal and his linguist father David travel the world in search of the stories of spoken English.Everyone has an accent, though many of us think we don't. We all have our likes and dislikes about the way other people speak, and everyone has something to say about 'correct' pronunciation. But how did all these accents come about, and why do people feel so strongly about them? Are regional accents dying out as English becomes a global language? And most importantly of all: what went wrong in Birmingham?Witty, authoritative and jam-packed full of fascinati

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Book SynopsisA much-cited and highly influential text by Alastair Pennycook, one of the world authorities in sociolinguistics, The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language explores the globalization of English by examining its colonial origins, its connections to linguistics and applied linguistics, and its relationships to the global spread of teaching practices. Nine chapters cover a wide range of key topics including: international politics colonial history critical pedagogy postcolonial literature. The book provides a critical understanding of the concept of the worldliness of English', or the idea that English can never be removed from the social, cultural, economic or political contexts in which it is used. Reissued with a substantial preface, this Routledge Linguistics Classic remains a landmark text, which led a much-needed critical and ideologically-informed investigatiTable of ContentsPreface Author's acknowledgementsPublishers' acknowledgements1. The world in English2. Discourse and dependency in a shifting world3. English and colonialism: origins of a discourse4. Spreading the word/disciplining the language5. ELT from development aid to global commodity6. The worldliness of English in Malaysia7. The worldliness of English in Singapore8. Writing back: the appropriation of English9. Towards a critical pedagogy for teaching English as a worldly languageReferencesIndex

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Book SynopsisGrasping how to swear is a crucial skill to any English-speaker, but it can be a tricky business. Owing to the rich and complex history of swearing, a single word can have a host of different meanings – from expressing surprise, excitement, anger, celebration, disgust or simply that you’re fucked off. If you don’t get it right, you could really be in the shit.How to Swear, by graphic artist and swearing-connoisseur Stephen Wildish, uses all manner of charts and flow diagrams to teach you all you need to know, including: the building blocks of an effective insult; the adverbial uses of various types of animal excrement (horseshit, apeshit etc); and the different parts of speech a swear word can fulfil: ‘Fucking fuck, the fucking fucker’s fucked’. This charming (and rude) book will take you right to the heart of the wondrous world of swearing, with a lot of laughs on the way.

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Book SynopsisThe new and updated third edition of this highly successful textbook contains an additional chapter that presents modern empirical research methods in the form of exemplary small-scale studies. In these projects the authors invite the reader to develop and address research questions from phonetics/phonology, morphology and syntax. The pertinent experimental and corpus-linguistic techniques are introduced and students are familiarized with some basic statistical tools necessary for the analysis of the data.The major difference between this book and its potential competitors lies in its hands-on didactic orientation, with a strong focus on linguistic analysis and argumentation. Language and linguistic theory are approached from a strictly empirical perspective: given a certain set of data to be accounted for, theoretical and methodological problems must be solved in order to analyze and understand the data properly. The book is not written from the perspective of a particular theoretical framework and draws on insights from various research traditions. Introduction to English Linguistics concentrates on gaining expertise and analytical skills in the traditional core areas of linguistics, i.e. phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. The chapter on "Extensions and applications" widens the perspective to other areas of linguistic research, such as historical, socio- and psycholinguistics. Each chapter is accompanied by exercises and suggestions for further reading. A glossary and an index facilitate access to terms and topics.

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Book SynopsisA surprising and entertaining explanation of how the words we use (even the ones we don''t notice) reveal our personalities, emotions, and identities.In The Secret Life of Pronouns, social psychologist and language expert James W. Pennebaker uses his groundbreaking research in computational linguistics-in essence, counting the frequency of words we use-to show that our language carries secrets about our feelings, our self-concept, and our social intelligence. Our most forgettable words, such as pronouns and prepositions, can be the most revealing: their patterns are as distinctive as fingerprints.Using innovative analytic techniques, Pennebaker X-rays everything from John McCain''s tweets to the Federalist Papers. Who would have predicted that the high school student who uses too many verbs in her college admissions essay is likely to make lower grades in college? Or that a world leader''s use of pronouns could reliably presage whether he will lead his country into war? You''ll learn what Lady Gaga and William Butler Yeats have in common, and how Ebenezer Scrooge''s syntax hints at his self-deception and repressed emotion in this sprightly, surprising tour of what our words are saying-whether we mean them to or not.

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Book SynopsisIt's not what you say, it's the way that you say it ... There have long been debates about 'correct' pronunciation in the English language, and Britain's most distinguished linguistic expert, David Crystal, is here to set the record straight. Sounds Appealing tells us exactly why, and how, we pronounce words as we do. Pronunciation is integral to communication, and is tailored to meet the demands of the two main forces behind language: intelligibility and identity. Equipping his readers with knowledge of phonetics, linguistics and physiology - with examples ranging from Eliza Doolittle to Winston Churchill - David Crystal explores the origins of regional accents, how they are influenced by class and education, and how their peculiarities have changed over time.Trade ReviewPrevious praise for David Crystal: Crystal's book is full of distractions and delights * Daily Express *Refreshing and briskly written ... Crystal shows that grammar is not nearly as tedious as it can seem * Sunday Times *If the history of language is a sort of labyrinth, David Crystal is an excellent guide * The Age, Australia *Delicious revelations ... Crystal does an excellent job, not just of tracing the etymology of a word, but of relating it to social history, painting a picture of our times through words * Independent on Sunday *

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Book SynopsisBased on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Onscreen/Offscreen is an exploration of the politics and being of filmic images. The book examines contestations inside and outside the Tamil film industry over the question "what is an image?" Answers to this question may be found in the ontological politics that take place on film sets, in theatre halls, and in the social fabric of everyday life in South India, from populist electoral politics and the gendering of social space to caste uplift and domination.Bridging and synthesizing linguistic anthropology, film studies, visual studies, and media anthropology, Onscreen/Offscreen rethinks key issues across a number of fields concerned with the semiotic constitution of social life, from the performativity and ontology of images to questions of spectatorship, realism, and presence. In doing so, it offers both a challenge to any approach that would separate image from social Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Note on Transliteration, Quotation, Names, and Transcripts Introduction: Ontological Politics of the Image Introduction From Ontologies to Ontological Politics Toward a Linguistic Anthropology of Cinema A Brief History of Tamil Cinema For a “Tamil” Cinema Realism and the Mass Hero Overview of the Chapters Part I: Presence/Representation 1. The Hero’s Mass Introduction Presence of the Film Image Gravity of the Hero’s Mass Presence of Mass Image-Act of the Slaps Sociological Realism of the Mass Hero’s Image Aesthetic Realism and the Event of the Slaps Ambivalent Realisms Authorizing the Slaps, or the Principal of Animation Conclusion 2. The Heroine’s Stigma Introduction Item’s Interruption Item’s Titillation Item’s Spectacle Ontological Politics of Sexual Difference Actness of the Image Politics of Vision Explicitness of Performativity Voyeurism and Exhibitionism in 7/G Rainbow Colony Kinship Chronotopes and Sociological Traces of the Performativity of Presence Marriage and Not-to-be-looked-at-ness An Alien Presence Conclusion Epilogue Part II: Representation/Presence 3. The Politics of Parody Introduction Anti-Cine-Politics of Thamizh Padam A Politics of (Im/possible) Worlds Chronopolitics For Another Kind of Image For a Less Serious Industry A Politics of Production The Politics for an Image Conclusion 4. The Politics of the Real Introduction Questions of Realism Register of Realism Enregistering Realism in Tamil Cinema Kaadhal (“Love”) Realism’s Heroism This Is a True Story Representing Taboo Caste and Sexuality in Kaadhal Frustrated Textuality and Sexual Reference Production Format of Realism New Faces and the Director’s Image Realism’s Illiberal Extimacy and the Suspension of Belief Conclusion Conclusions An End of an Era Killing the Mass Hero Performativity Representation and the Method Theory of a Linguistic Anthropology of Cinema For a Linguistic Anthropology of … Notes Interviews and Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisIn this extensive study of the changing role of Gaelic in modern Scotland, Wilson McLeod looks at the policies of government and the work of activists and campaigners who have sought to maintain and promote Gaelic.

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Book SynopsisLanguage enables us to represent our world, rendering salient the identities, groups, and categories that constitute social life. Michael Silverstein (19452020) was at the forefront of the study of language in culture, and this book unifies a lifetime of his conceptual innovations in a set of seminal lectures.Focusing not just on what people say buthowwe say it, Silverstein shows how discourse unfolds in interaction. At the same time, he reveals that discoursefar exceeds discrete events, stabilizing and transforming societies, politics, and markets through chains of activity.Presenting his magisterial theoretical vision in engaging prose, Silverstein unpacks technical terms through myriad examples from brilliant readings of Marcel Marceau''spantomime, the class-laced banter of graduate students, and the poetics/politics of wine-tasting, to Fijian gossip and US courtroom talk. He draws on forebearsin linguistics and anthropology while offering his distinctive semiotic approach, redefinTrade Review'Brilliant, comprehensive, and always thought-provoking, Language in Culture is a truly singular contribution. Silverstein has brought his subtle and elegantly laid-out theoretical approach together with the acute and generative exploration of detailed exemplary cases - and always in his own distinctive and engaging voice. This is bound to be an immediate classic of lasting resonance.' Don Brenneis, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology Emeritus, University of California, Santa Cruz'This treasure of a book lays out the total linguistic fact, with all of Silverstein's classic brilliance, erudition, and mischievousness.' Penelope Eckert, Albert Ray Lang Professor Emerita, Stanford University'It's difficult to find words to characterize adequately Michael Silverstein's genius, or the significance of his work. He is a singular figure. It's tempting to think of him as a kind of Saussure for our century, except that, as this elegantly constructed volume reveals, Silverstein disassembles Saussure's framework and uses the component parts - along with myriad elements from elsewhere (Peirce, Whorf, Sapir, Jakobson, Bakhtin, and many others) - to build a wondrous new construction that allows a breathtakingly rich view of how language works and of what happens when we use it.' Michael Lucey, Sidney and Margaret Ancker Professor of Comparative Literature and French, University of California, Berkeley'With his signature searing clarity and punning wit, Michael Silverstein at long last lays out in print what decades of students have heard - the detailed, layered, and at once remarkably robust and subtle semiotic mechanisms through which we co-construct our worlds, or wreck them, hold them in a precarious order or teeter off course.' Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies, Columbia UniversityTable of ContentsList of Figures; Foreword; Preface; Introduction: Getting – and getting across – the message; Lecture 1: Text; Lecture 2: Event; Lecture 3: Context; Lecture 4: Enregisterment; Lecture 5: Variation; Lecture 6: Categoriality; Lecture 7: Relativity; Lecture 8: Knowledge; Editorial acknowledgments; References; Index.

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Book SynopsisThis book traces the surprising social history of China’s spoken standard, from its creation as the national language of the early Republic in 1913 to its journey into postwar Taiwan to its reconfiguration as the common language of the People’s Republic after 1949.Trade ReviewThe Sounds of Mandarin is the definitive study of the modern Chinese quest for a unified spoken language. Janet Y. Chen transports readers into the meeting rooms where linguistic models were debated and the classrooms, movie theaters, and military units where the national language was taught. She captures the elusiveness of crafting a single national standard and the challenge of making it a living language. -- Robert Culp, author of The Power of Print in Modern China: Intellectuals and Industrial Publishing from the End of Empire to Maoist State SocialismThis absorbing narrative traces efforts to establish a common spoken language across China’s national expanse. Ingenious reformers, determined state authorities, and beleaguered teachers were no match for China’s cacophonous soundscape. Placing spoken language at the heart of historical explanation, The Sounds of Mandarin is by turns hilarious and sobering. -- Gail Hershatter, University of California, Santa CruzIn prose that is as clear as it is elegant, Chen’s book introduces the myriad actors—reformists, linguists, educators, and state officials—who negotiated the social stakes, political implications, and pedagogical processes of making the Chinese nation speak, utter, sing, and chant in unity. This is a wonderful read by a masterful historian. -- Eugenia Lean, author of Vernacular Industrialism in China: Local Innovation and Translated Technologies in the Making of a Cosmetics Empire, 1900-1940For years, scholars mostly assumed that we knew the roughly parallel stories of ‘linguistic unification,’ both on the Chinese mainland and in Taiwan: a slow but inexorable triumph of standardization pushed by strong states armed with new technologies. Janet Y. Chen’s exciting book shows us something radically different: stop-start cycles of intense campaigns; powerful, multivalent resistance; changing, politically fraught standards; and divergent outcomes. -- Kenneth Pomeranz, author of The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World EconomyIn The Sounds of Mandarin, Chen explores the complex process by which Chinese nation-builders struggled to define and promulgate a shared national language, to enable the state to talk to its citizens and its citizens to talk to one another. The result is a surprising and fascinating window into the politics of modernizing China. -- Michael Szonyi, professor of history and former director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard UniversityA valuable addition to the growing scholarship on Chinese languages and scripts. * China Quarterly *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsNotes on Language and TransliterationIntroduction1. Dueling Sounds and Contending Tones2. In Search of Standard Mandarin3. The National Language in Exile4. Taiwan Babel5. The Common Language of New ChinaEpilogueNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisWords matter. They wound, they inflate, they define, they demean. They have nuance and power. "Effortless," "Sassy," "Ambitious," "Aggressive": What subtle digs and sneaky implications are conveyed when women are described with words like these? Words are made into weapons, warnings, praise and blame, bearing an outsize influence on women's lives-to say nothing of our moods.No one knows this better than Lizzie Skurnick, writer of the New York Times' column "That Should be A Word" and a veritable queen of cultural coinage. And in Pretty Bitches, Skurnick has rounded up a group of powerhouse women writers to take on the hidden meanings of these words and how they can limit our worlds - or liberate them. From Laura Lipmann and Meg Wolizer to Jennifer Weiner and Rebecca Traister, each writer uses her word as a vehicle for memoir, cultural commentary, critique, or all three. Spanning the street, the bedroom, the voting booth and the workplace, these simple words have huge stories behind them - stories it's time to examine, re-imagine and change.

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Book SynopsisThis book is the first comprehensive and systematic introduction to the linguistics of humor. Salvatore Attardo takes a broad approach to the topic, exploring not only theoretical linguistic analyses, but also pragmatic and semantic aspects, conversation and discourse analysis, ethnomethodology, and interactionist and variationist sociolinguistics. The volume begins with chapters that introduce the terminology and conceptual and methodological apparatus, as well as outlining the major theories in the field and examining incongruity and resolution and the semiotics of humor. The second part of the book explores humor competence, with chapters that cover semantic and pragmatic topics, the General Theory of Verbal Humor, and puns and their interpretation. The third part provides an in-depth discussion of the applied linguistics of humor, and examines social context, discourse and conversation analysis, and sociolinguistic aspects. In the final part of the book, the discussion is extended beyond the central field of linguistics, with chapters discussing humor in literature, in translation, and in the classroom. The volume brings together the multiple strands of current knowledge about humor and linguistics, both theoretical and applied; it assumes no prior background in humor studies, and will be a valuable resource for students from advanced undergraduate level upwards, particularly those coming to linguistics from related disciplines.Trade ReviewThis elementary book is well structured and presented for readers without prior training in humor studies. Overall, it provides a clear foundation for understanding humor's embedding in linguistic practice, and its distinct (yet overlapping) cognitive, emotional, and physiological/embodied manifestations. As awkward as it can sometimes be to explain a joke, I enjoyed every aspect of this enlightening, eye-opening book. * Joseph Comer, Language in Society *The book-a must for linguists and humour scholarsalike -is intended to assess the current state of research and "set it out clearly in as comprehensive a framework as possible" (p. 384). * Władysław Chłopicki, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland, The European Journal of Humour Research *Indispensable, both as a text and for deep reading and reflection, giving comprehensive insight into how linguistics applies to humorous communications and the wider realms of humour theory and analysis. This book reflects a lifetime of reading and thinking on the complex and puzzling topic--what is the nature of humour and how do we research it? * Jessica Milner Davis, University of Sydney *It is often held to be a scientific ideal that we draw from multiple disciplinary perspectives in advancing our understanding of complex social phenomena such as humour, but we fall short of that ideal for the most part. Professor Attardo shows us how it should be done. In The Linguistics of Humor, he offers us a masterful and insightful overview that will help both those new to the field, as well as seasoned researchers, navigate the rapidly growing field of humour studies. Throughout the volume he integrates different theoretical and methodological perspectives, resulting in something that is much more than the simple sum of its parts. This is a must-read for anyone interested in humour studies. * Michael Haugh, University of Queensland *No doubt the most comprehensive treatment of the linguistic study of humor. Attardo succeeds, in particular, in showing how the phenomenon (or better, phenomena) of humor involve(s) the full complexity of what people do with language. * Jef Verschueren, University of Antwerp *Attardo successfully anticipates what target audiences want to know, what questions they may have, and what narrative style is optimal for them to understand the linguistics of humor. The target audience will surely benefit from this outstanding work...Reading this book while reflecting on one's own research, linguistic researchers studying humor can get insightful information. * Baiyao Zu, Brill *Table of ContentsPreface List of figures and tables Part I: Humor Studies 1: Humor studies: A few definitions 2: Methodological preliminaries 3: Theories of humor and their levels 4: Incongruity and resolution 5: Semiotics of humor Part II: Humor Competence 6: The semantics of humor 7: The General Theory of Verbal Humor 8: Pragmatics of humor 9: Verbal humor Part III: Humor Performance 10: The performance of humor 11: Conversation analysis: Humor in conversation I 12: Discourse analysis: Humor in conversation II 13: Sociolinguistics of humor Part IV: Applications 14: Humor in literature 15: Humor and translation 16: Humor in the classroom 17: Conclusion Glossary References Index

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Book SynopsisEven before its usage to mean “a female canine,” bitch didn’t refer to women at all—it originated as a gender-neutral word for “genitalia.” A perfectly innocuous word devolving into an insult directed at females is the case for tons more terms, including hussy, which simply meant “housewife”;Trade Review“Amanda Montell has given validation and tools to those of us who have always felt wrong in our guts about the way gender permeates our means of communication and the criticisms often lobbed at women for how we talk. Wordslut is brilliant fun and empowers all women to give ourselves a voice.” -- Gaby Dunn, author of Bad with Money“As funny as it is informative, this book will have you laughing out loud while you contemplate the revolutionary power of words. Who knew sociolinguistics could be so damn entertaining? Leave it to a master of language like Amanda Montell to pull off this semantic magic trick.” -- Camille Perri, author of The Assistants and When Katie Met Cassidy Grounded in decades of innovative feminist scholarship, full of witty personal stories, and written with the pragmatic aim of disrupting and changing the status quo, this is a humorous and important book for anyone interested in gender equality, wordplay, or fostering precise communication. Just the kind of sharp, relevant scholarship needed to continue to inspire the next generation of feminist thought. -- Kirkus Reviews“I get so jazzed about the future of feminism knowing that Amanda Montell’s brilliance is rising up and about to explode worldwide.” -- Jill Soloway“As a bitch who says bitch and loves to talk about bitches, this smart and freakishly entertaining book awakens parts of my brain I didn’t know existed while tickling all my foul-mouthed, feminist, word-obsessed fancies. If you’re a human who speaks English and aren’t reading this, then what on earth are you doing.” -- Samantha Irby“This feisty, fascinating critique of the English language will make you feel smarter after every paragraph. Amanda Montell’s analyses are sharp and provocative but also funny and accessible. She’s the cool feminist nerd we need.” -- Whitney Cummings, creator of 2 Broke Girls“At its heart, this work reflects a tenet of sociolinguistic study: language is not divorced from culture; it both reflects and creates beliefs about identity and power. Modern stylings situated within foundational research will hopefully bring a new audience to the field of language and gender studies.” -- Library Journal“Wordslut is filled with fascinating info about the sexist history of our language: I literally said ‘whoa’ multiple times while reading this book. It is so witty and brilliant. Men and women both need to read it.” -- Blyth Roberson

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Book SynopsisThis study of Japanese business discourse adopts Bakhtin''s notion of speech genres as an heuristic in order to analyze groups of spoken texts which display similar constellations of compositional, thematic, and stylistic features. Drawing upon a corpus of over 540 naturally-occurring telephone conversations collected in the Kanto and Kansai areas of Japan, Lindsay Amthor Yotsukura demonstrates how Japanese business professionals present, negotiate and clarify their identities and intentions and enlist and offer assistance with respect to a variety of transactions such as toiawase inquiries, merchandise orders, shipping confirmations, and reports of delivery problems. In the process, she highlights the critical deictic function of linguistic devices such as the no desu (extended predicate) construction in producing formulations, and politeness expressions that index the dynamic uti/soto (''inside''/ ''outside'') continuum. She also illustrates some of the ways in which these negotiatinTrade Review'...this volume offers much new information about the structure of Japanese interaction and will be of tremendous value in the rapidly expanding field of Japanese discourse' Scott Saft, Japanese Language and Literature, Vol 38, issue 1, 2004 "...in what it says about Japanese, its arguments, supported by excellent exemplification throughout the book, are strong, and deserve to be fed into the mainstream of debate on the notion of genre, particularly spoken genres, an area where much work in the construction of theory and analytical frameworks still remains to be done." Michael McCarthy, University of Nottingham, published in Applied Linguistics (2005) 26: 128-131; doi:10.1093/applin/amh045Table of ContentsIntroduction: Objectives; Related linguistic studies on Japanese business discourse and negotiation; Motivation for the study; Identifying and describing a genre - Japanese business transactional telephone conversations; Bakhtin and the notion of speech genres; Focal exchange - problem presentation and resolution; Specific goals of the study; Overview of subsequent chapters. Data and Methodology: Introduction; Recent methods for data elicitation; Rationale for an ethnomethodological approach; Data collection methods for this study; Description of the JBC corpus; The genre of Japanese business transactional telephone conversations; Relevant findings from conversation analysis; Previous studies on offers in Japanese; Closings; Concluding remarks. The Structure of Japanese Business Transactional Telephone Conversations: Introduction; Business transactional calls vs service encounters; Overall structure and identifying register features; Call openings; Transition section; Matter(s) for business discussion; Pre-closing devices; Discussion of other issues or transactions; Concluding remarks. Types of Japanese Business Transactional Telephone Calls: Introduction; General toiawase inquiries; Merchandise orders; Shipping confirmations; Problem reports; Concluding remarks. Problem Presentation and Resolution in Japanese Business Transactional Calls: Introduction; Problem presentation and resolution in JBCs - two examples; Interactional asynchrony in JBCs; Problem reports in English; Problem reporting sequences in English vs; Japanese service encounters; Interactional asynchrony in English - service recipients' accounts vs; service providers' formulations; Problem resolution in English vs; Japanese; Concluding remarks. Cultural and Sociolinguistic Considerations: Introduction; Metalanguage regarding communication in Japanese; Ellipsis and uti/soto deixis; Japan as a high context culture; Concluding remarks; Conclusions. Strategies for reporting problems> The function and distribution of moves toward problem resolution; Role relationships, genre, and cultural norms; Putting genres to use; Areas for future research.

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Book SynopsisThis is a classic book on a fascinating subject. Peter Trudgill examines the close link between language and society and the many factors that influence the way we speak. These range from gender, environment, age, race, class, region and politics. Trudgill's book surveys languages and societies from all over the world drawing on examples from Afrikaans to Yiddish. He has added a fascinating chapter on the development of a language as a result of a non-native speaker's use of it. Compelling and authoritative, this new edition of a bestselling book is set to redraw the boundaries of the study of sociolinguistics.Table of ContentsList of Figures, Maps and TablesAcknowledgmentsPhonetic Symbols1. Sociolinguistics—Language and Society2. Language and Social Class3. Language and Ethnic Group 4. Language and Sex5. Language and Context6. Language and Social Interaction7. Language and Nation8. Language and Geography9. Language and HumanityAnnotated Bibliography and Further ReadingIndex

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Book SynopsisIn The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, Steven Pinker looks at how the relationship between words and thoughts can help us understand who we are. Why do so many swear words involve topics like sex, bodily functions or the divine? Why do some children''s names thrive while others fall out of favour? Why do we threaten and bribe and seduce in such elaborate, often comical ways? How can a choice of metaphor damn a politician or start a war? And why do we rarely say what we actually mean? Language, as Steven Pinker shows, is at the heart of our lives, and through the way we use it - whether to inform, persuade, entertain or manipulate - we can glimpse the very essence of what makes us human. ''Awesome''  Daily Mail ''Highly entertaining ... funny and thought-provoking''  The Times ''Anyone interested in language should read The Stuff of Thought ... mTrade ReviewAstonishingly readable * Daily Telegraph *Perceptive, amusing and intelligent * Times *No one writes about language as clearly as Steven Pinker, and this is his best book yet * Financial Times *Immensely readable and stimulating. Pinker is a master at making complex ideas palatable * Independent *Awesome ... Pinker writes lucidly and elegantly, and leavens the text with scores of perfectly judged anecdotes, jokes, cartoons and illustrations * Daily Mail *

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Book SynopsisFrom its beginnings in the 1960s, sociolinguistics developed several different subfields with distinct methods and interests: the variationist tradition established by Labov, the anthropological tradition of Hymes, interactional sociolinguistics as developed by Gumperz, and the sociology of language represented by the work of Fishman. All of these areas have seen a great deal of growth in recent decades, and recent studies have led to a more broadly inclusive view of sociolinguistics. Hence there is a need for a handbook that will survey the main areas of the field, point out the lacunae in our existing knowledge base, and provide directions for future research.The Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics will differ from existing work in four major respects. First, it will emphasize new methodological developments, particularly the convergence of linguistic anthropology and variationist sociolinguistics. Second, it will include chapters on sociolinguistic developments in areas of the worldTrade Review... an invaluable new contribution to the field of sociolinguists ... While it certainly stands out for its careful organization of abundant material, it must be especially praised for the special attention given to relevant topics that pertain to modern-day social preoccupations. In this sense, it will no doubt inspire those in the field to further their research ... this handbook is a unique and welcomed addition to the Oxford Handbook collection * Pablo Pintado-Casas, LINGUIST *The Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics contains many insightful chapters, especially on sociolinguistic variation and on language attitudes and policy * Philipp S Angermeyer, Journal of Sociolinguistics *The...handbook benefits from the fact that all of the authors are outstanding scholars who are extremely well known in their respective areas of expertise... [G]raduate students who are interested in sociolinguistic studies are most likely to benefit from reading this handbook in its entirety, because the editors have taken great care to account for a combination of theoretical and practical insights regarding studies of language in social contexts. * Language *Table of ContentsCONTENTS ; Contributors ; List of Tables ; List of Figures ; Introduction ; Robert Bayley, Richard Cameron, and Ceil Lucas ; Part I. Disciplinary Perspectives ; 1. Variationist Sociolinguistics ; Robert Bayley ; 2. Linguistic Anthropology ; Janet Shibamotoe-Smith and Vineeta Chand ; 3. Doers and Makers: The Interwoven Stories of Sociology and the Study of Language ; Christopher McAll ; 4. Critical Discourse Analysis ; Martin Reisigl ; 5. Conversation Analysis ; Paul Seedhouse ; 6. The Intersections of Language Socialization and Sociolinguistics ; Karen Watson-Gegeo and Matthew C. Bronson ; 7. Psycholinguistic Approaches ; Brandon C. Loudermilk ; 8. Interdisciplinary Approaches ; Christine Mallinson and Tyler Kendall ; Part II. Methodologies and Approaches ; 9. Studies of the Community and the Individual ; James A. Walker and Miriam Meyerhoff ; 10. Experimental Methods for Measuring Intelligibility of Closely Related Language Varieties ; Charlotte Gooskens ; 11. Quantitative Analysis ; Kyle Gorman and Daniel Ezra Johnson ; 12. Analyzing Qualitative Data: Mapping the Research Trajectory in Multilingual Contexts ; Juliet Langman ; 13. Longitudinal Studies ; Gillian Sankoff ; 14. Methods for Studying Sign Languages ; Ceil Lucas ; Part III. Bilingualism and Language Contact ; 15. Pidgins and Creoles ; Eric Russell Webb ; 16. Language Maintenance and Shift ; Kim Potowski ; 17. Sociolinguistics and Second Language Acquisition ; Martin Howard, Raymond Mougeon, and Jean-Marc Dewaele ; 18. Codeswitching ; Li Wei ; 19. Sign Language Contact ; David Quinto-Pozos and Robert Adam ; Part IV. Variation ; 20. Sociophonetics ; Maciej Baranowski ; 21. Phonology and Sociolinguistics ; Naomi Nagy ; 22. Morphosyntactic Variation ; Ruth King ; 23. Pragmatics and Sociolinguistic Variation ; Richard Cameron and Scott Schwenter ; 24. Variation and Change ; Alexandra D'Arcy ; 25. Sociolinguistic Variation and Change in Sign Languages ; Adam Schembri and Trevor Johnston ; Part V. Language Policy, Language Ideology, and Language Attitudes ; 26. Language Policy, Ideology, and Attitudes in English-Dominant Countries ; Thomas Ricento ; 27. Language Policies and Language Attitudes in Africa: Challenges and Prospects for Vernacularization ; Nkonko M. Kamwangamalu ; 28. Language Policy and Ideology: Greater China ; Qing Zhang ; 29. Language Policies and Politics in South Asia ; Vineeta Chand ; 30. Language Policy and Ideology in Latin America ; Enrique Rainer Hamel ; 31. Language Policy, Ideology, and Attitudes in Western Europe ; Francois Grin ; 32. Language Management in the Russian Empire, Soviet Union, and Post-Soviet Countries ; Aneta Pavlenko ; 33. Language Policy and Attitudes towards Sign Languages ; Joseph Hill ; Part VI. Sociolinguistics, the Professions, and the Public Interest ; 34. Language and Law ; Gregory Matoesian ; 35. Our Stories, Ourselves: Can the Culture of a Large Medical School Be Changed without Open Heart Surgery? ; Richard M. Frankel ; 36. Sociolinguistic Studies of Sign Language Interpreting ; Cynthia Roy and Melanie Metzger ; 37. Language Awareness in Community Perspective: Obligation and Opportunity ; Walt Wolfram ; 38. Linguistic and Ecological Diversity ; Suzanne Romaine ; 39. Language Revitalization ; Lenore A. Grenoble ; 40. Linguistics and Social Activism ; Anne H. Charity Hudley

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Book SynopsisTable of ContentsChapter One: Introduction: Garfinkel and the Ethnomethodology Movement John Heritage and Douglas W. Maynard SECTION ONE: ANTECEDENTS AND THEORY Chapter Two: A Comparison of Decisions Made on Four 'Pre-Theoretical' Problems by Talcott Parsons and Alfred Schuetz Harold Garfinkel Chapter Three: Harold Garfinkel's Focus on Racism, Inequality and Social Justice: The Early Years 1939-1952 Anne W. Rawls Chapter Four: Garfinkel's Studies of Work Michael E. Lynch SECTION 2: EMPIRICAL IMPACT Chapter Five: Ways of Working: An Introduction to the Study of Naturally Organized Ordinary Activities Harold Garfinkel Chapter Six: Rules and Their Enforcement "For Another First Time": Policing the Sidewalk Geoffrey Raymond, Lillian Jungleib, Don Zimmerman, and Nikki Jones Chapter Seven: The Co-Operative, Transformative Organization of Human Action and Knowledge Charles Goodwin Chapter Eight: Sex and the Sociological Dope: Garfinkel's Intervention into the Emerging Disciplines of Sex/Gender Kristen Schilt Chapter Nine: Garfinkel, Social Problems, and Deviance: Reflections on the Values of Ethnomethodology Darin Weinberg Chapter Ten: Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis: Mutual Influences Steven Clayman, John Heritage, and Douglas W. Maynard SECTION 3: GROWTH POINTS Chapter Eleven: The Situated and Methodic Production of Accountable Action: The Challenges of Multimodality Lorenza Mondada Chapter Twelve: Recovering the Work of a Discovering Science with a Video Camera in Hand: The Electronically Probed/Visually Discovered Spectrum Philippe Sormani Chapter Thirteen: Research with Numbers Michael Mair, Christian Greiffenhagen, and Wes Sharrock Chapter Fourteen: The Sherlock Experiment Eric Livingston and John Heritage Chapter Fifteen: Technology in Action Christian Heath and Paul Luff Chapter Sixteen: Occam's Razor and the Challenges of Generalization in Ethnomethodology Iddo Tavory Chapter Seventeen: Ethnomethodology and Atypical Interaction: The Case of Autism Douglas W. Maynard and Jason J. Turowetz Index

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Book SynopsisTable of ContentsIntroduction Chapter 1: "The Arab is the New Nigger": African American Comics Confront the Irony and Tragedy of 9/11 Chapter 2: "Why we gotta be refugees?": Empathizing Authenticity in African American Hurricane Katrina Humor Chapter 3: On Michael Richards, Racial Authenticity, and the N-Word Chapter 4: "It's about to get real": Kevin Hart as a Modern-Day Trickster Chapter 5: Humor, Me: A (Tentative) Conclusion Bibliography Appendix

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Book SynopsisIn 1578, the Anglo-Italian author, translator, and teacher John Florio wrote that English was ''a language that wyl do you good in England, but passe Dover, it is woorth nothing''.Learning Languages in Early Modern England Learning Languages in Early Modern England is the first major study of how English-speakers learnt a variety of continental vernacular languages in the period between 1480 and 1720. English was practically unknown outside of England, which meant that the English who wanted to travel and trade with the wider world in this period had to become language-learners. Using a wide range of printed and manuscript sources, from multilingual conversation manuals to travellers'' diaries and letters where languages mix and mingle,Learning Languages explores how early modern English-speakers learned and used foreign languages, and asks what it meant to be competent in another language in the past. Beginning with language lessons in early modern England, it offers a new perspective on England''s ''educational revolution''. John Gallagher looks for the first time at the whole corpus of conversation manuals written for English language-learners, and uses these texts to pose groundbreaking arguments about reading, orality, and language in the period. He also reconstructs the practices of language-learning and multilingual communication which underlay early modern travel.Learning Languages in Early Modern England offers a new and innovative study of a set of practices and experiences which were crucial to England''s encounter with the wider world, and to the fashioning of English linguistic and cultural identities at home. Interdisciplinary in its approaches and broad in its chronological and thematic scope, this volume places language-learning and multilingualism at the heart of early modern British and European history.Trade Review[Learning Languages] exemplifies the benefit of combining cutting-edge historical research with historical sociolinguistics ... [Gallagher] handles a wealth of multilingual manuscripts — language exercises, diaries, notebooks, and correspondence — that connect three layers: texts, oral speech and pronunciation, as well as social communication. ... This work comprehensively combines ideas and approaches from the histories of education, books, and travel with social and cultural history. ... From extracurricular education to conversation manuals and travellers' accounts, it illuminates the dynamics of language learning and multilingualism in early modern England and its encounters with continental Europe. * Weiao Xing, Journal of Historical Sciolinguistics *Learning Languages in Early Modern England offers a fresh account both of the desire for foreign languages that animated early modern English culture and of some of the means pursued by the English in order to acquire them. It will be indispensable for readers interested in the histories of English foreign relations and travel as well as for those whose research treats the history of languages instruction more narrowly. * Rory G. Critten, Journal of British Studies *Gallagher... assembles a rich body of documentary evidence to illustrate the methods and social importance of instruction in vernacular languages. ... Gallagher's main point is simple but powerful: 'early modern England was multilingual.' ...[He has] given us a picture of an early modern England made louder and more boisterous by print, not silenced by it. Printed books made foreign languages more accessible, even to those without a private teacher or the funds to travel. Overseas trade and global politics resulted in greater interest in foreign tongues, with books on Arabic, Malay and Narragansett as well as the Continental standards. Immigrants take their place here as teachers, authors of foreign-language manuals, and students of English in their own right. This is a story of England finding its many voices. * Irina Dumitrescu, London Review of Books *The methodological tools and historical contexts... will be of much use to both historians and literary scholars... Gallagher's concepts are clearly defined and arguments well developed... Learning Languages in Early Modern England is a significant contribution to scholarly conversations about historical multilingualism, education, language acquisition, and intellectual economies and networks; it will be found of much interest and importance not just to the student of English cultural history, but to anyone with an interest in textual production and/or social interactions in the early modern period, who will be inspired by its arguments about the role of languages and learning in people's lived experience in the period, and aided by its clarity of thought and organization. * Sjoerd Levelt, Renaissance Studies *Gallagher is meticulous in his work, and bases his narrative on early modern primary records. ...The sheer volume of Gallagher's sources is convincing, and the society that he describes is one where polyglot men and women of different classes delight in 'speaking tongues'. ...Gallagher also explains why learning another language was important in early modern England, and this may offer a different perspective to the one we have on that society. * Onyeka Nubia, Social History *How English men and women of the late 15th to the early 18th century went about doing so is the subject of John Gallagher's fascinating new book, a welcome attempt to show that the history of language encompasses much more than just the history of words. * Fara Dabhoiwala, The Guardian *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1: Extracurricular Economy: Language Teachers and Language Schools in Early-Modern England 2: Speaking Books: The Early-Modern Conversation Manual 3: To Be Languaged: Early-Modern Linguistic Competences 4: A Conversable Knowledge: Language-Learning and Educational Travel Conclusion

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Book SynopsisPinpoints how dogwhistles and figleaves, two kinds of linguistic trick, distort political discourse and normalize racismIt is widely accepted that political discourse in recent years has become more openly racist and more accepting of wildly implausible conspiracy theories. Dogwhistles and Figleaves explores ways in which such changes--both of which defied previously settled norms of political speech--have been brought about. Jennifer Saul shows that two linguistic devices, dogwhistles and figleaves, have played a crucial role. Some dogwhistles (such as 88, used by Nazis online to mean Heil Hitler) serve to disguise messages that would otherwise be rejected as unacceptable, allowing them to be transmitted surreptitiously. Other dogwhistles (like the 1988 Willie Horton ad) work by influencing people in ways that they are not aware of, and which they would likely reject were they aware. Figleaves (such as just asking questions) take messages that could easily be recognized as unacceptablTrade ReviewIt's a scrupulous look at a damaging linguistic phenomenon that often hides in plain sight. * Publishers Weekly *What is interesting about Saul's study is the instability of meaning it reveals, the layers of deception employed not only by speakers, but by listeners, who are occasionally deluding themselves ... clear, engaging and very readable. * Roisin Kiberd, Irish Independent *There is no doubt that our current political climate is posing a threat to democracy. It is not only that we are polarized, but polarization is fueled by an onslaught of (often thinly veiled) manipulative speech and falsehoods. Media consumers absorb distorting messages without even being aware of it, and speakers are not held responsible. Dogwhistles and Figleaves provides an essential tool for seeing how our ability to communicate and to coordinate is being undermined. This theoretically rich and highly readable book is essential for those who value democracy, and the kind of public discourse that makes it possible. * Sally Haslanger, Ford Professor of Philosophy and Women's and Genders Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology *Table of ContentsIntroduction Part 1: Racism 1: White Racism, White Folk Racial Theory, and White Racial Discourse 2: Racist Dogwhistles 3: Figleaves for Racism Part 2: Falsehood 4: The Rise of Blatant Falsehood and Wild Conspiracism 5: Figleaves, Dogwhistles, and Falsehood 6: Obvious Falsehoods Without Deniability 7: Dogwhistles, Figleaves, and the Fight Against Racism and Blatant Falsehood

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Book SynopsisThis book offers an accessible introduction to the main issues in language policy today, and to the origins and conceptual foundations of the relationship between language and the state. Florian Coulmas draws on specific examples from around the world to explore how countries make decisions about which language - and which variety or form of that language - should be used for key functions such as primary education, government administration, and the law. The book provides historical background to shed light on present-day policy disputes concerning language, and looks at how the resulting decisions are implemented in schools and other institutions. A common thread that runs through the chapters is the question of whether the involvement of the government in language regulation is a necessity, a blessing, or a curse. Written in a concise and engaging style, Language Policy: A Slim Guide is suitable for readers from all backgrounds who are interested in the interaction between language and politics.

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Book SynopsisThis book represents a major statement of the current research being conducted on the learning of second languages from a sociocultural perspective. The book is divided into a theoretical and an empirical part. Specific topics covered include: learning and teaching languages in the zone of proximal development; L1 mediation in the acquisition of L2 grammar; sociocultural theory as a theory of second language learning; gestural mediation in a second language; and constructing a self through a second language.Table of ContentsIntroducing sociocultural theory ; 1. Sociocultural contributions to understanding the foreign and second language classroom ; 2. Rethinking interaction in SLA: Developmentally appropriate assistance in the zone of proximal development and the acquisition of L2 grammar ; 3. Subjects speak out: How learners position themselves in a psycholinguistic task ; 4. The output hypothesis and beyond: Mediating acquisition through collaborative dialogue ; 5. Playfulness as mediation in communicative language teaching in a Vietnamese classroom ; 6. Social discursive constructions of self in L2 learning ; 7. Second language learning as participation and the (re)construction of selves ; 8. Side affects: The strategic development of professional satisfaction ; 9. The appropriation of gestures of the abstract by L2 learners ; 10. Second language acquisition theory and the truth(s) about relativity ; 11. From input to affordance: Social-interactive learning from an ecological perspective ; Bibliography ; Index

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Book SynopsisThis is a sociolinguistic study of how people create and exchange coherent oral life stories. Linde claims such stories serve a number of psychological and social purposes, including the development and expression of a sense of self and the solidification and definition of relationships and group memberships. She focuses on different coherence systems, including `common sense'' and its peculiarly American nature.Trade Review"An excellent example of interdisciplinary theory and research, and a lucid introduction to the study of narrative. Linde bridges the neglected gap between rhetoric and the psychology of narrative. Really delightful."--Andrew Garrison, Miami University "Looks extremely interesting....Offers the opportunity to bridge some significant gaps in our understanding of how our self schemas really function."--Elizabeth Weiss Ozorak, Allegheny College "I have read Life Stories with much pleasure and enlightenment. It is a work that combines impressive scholarship in several academic disciplines, and an insightful perspective on popular culture. It will make a substantial contribution to several fields: linguistics, conversation analysis, discourse analysis, psychology, anthropology, and sociology--and no doubt others as well."--Robin Lakoff, University of California, Berkeley "Charlotte Linde's book provides a useful exploration of life stories' structure and their implications for larger issues."--Anthropological Linguistics "Linde's provocative work will stimulate sociologists to rethink how sociological analyses can benefit from the contributions of its cousin sociolinguistics and visa versa."--American Journal of Sociology "Life Stories is a richly innovative study, packed with insights into the way we use stories to create and maintain an identity over time. ...the book contains much that will interest a wide variety of readers, from linguists, narratologists, and literary theorists, to sudents of autobiography and folklore. An imaginative, stylishly written and boldly interdisciplinary study, Life Stories focuses our attention on a hitherto unexplored mode of narrative discourse, throwing new light on the interconnections between self and story."--Style "An excellent example of interdisciplinary theory and research, and a lucid introduction to the study of narrative. Linde bridges the neglected gap between rhetoric and the psychology of narrative. Really delightful."--Andrew Garrison, Miami University "Looks extremely interesting....Offers the opportunity to bridge some significant gaps in our understanding of how our self schemas really function."--Elizabeth Weiss Ozorak, Allegheny College "I have read Life Stories with much pleasure and enlightenment. It is a work that combines impressive scholarship in several academic disciplines, and an insightful perspective on popular culture. It will make a substantial contribution to several fields: linguistics, conversation analysis, discourse analysis, psychology, anthropology, and sociology--and no doubt others as well."--Robin Lakoff, University of California, Berkeley "Charlotte Linde's book provides a useful exploration of life stories' structure and their implications for larger issues."--Anthropological Linguistics "Linde's provocative work will stimulate sociologists to rethink how sociological analyses can benefit from the contributions of its cousin sociolinguistics and visa versa."--American Journal of Sociology "Life Stories is a richly innovative study, packed with insights into the way we use stories to create and maintain an identity over time. ...the book contains much that will interest a wide variety of readers, from linguists, narratologists, and literary theorists, to students of autobiography and folklore. An imaginative, stylishly written and boldly interdisciplinary study, Life Stories focuses our attention on a hitherto unexplored mode of narrative discourse, throwing new light on the interconnections between self and story."--Style

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Book SynopsisWierzbicka demonstrates that every language has its key concepts (expressed in key words) and that these concepts reflect the core values of the culture in question. Examining empirical evidence from five languages, and using her own natural semantic metalanguage to provide an analytical framework, she shows that cultures can be revealingly studied, compared and explained to outsiders through their key concepts.Trade ReviewThere is a lot to be gleaned from just about anything produced by Wierzbicka - the "key words book" [...] is no exception [...]. The observations are plentiful and fascinating [...]. [Wierzbicka] has done more than anyone else to really "understand cultures through their key words". * Word, 51 [2000] *

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Book SynopsisA dramatic account of the rate of language extinction, and how it endangers the future of biodiversityFew people know that nearly 100 native languages once spoken in what is now California are near extinction, or that most of Australia''s 250 aboriginal languages have vanished. In fact, at least half of the world''s languages may die out in the next century. What has happened to these voices? Should we be alarmed about the disappearance of linguistic diversity?The authors of Vanishing Voices assert that this trend is far more than simply disturbing. Making explicit the link between language survival and environmental issues, they argue that the extinction of languages is part of the larger picture of near-total collapse of the worldwide ecosystem. Indeed, the authors contend that the struggle to preserve precious environmental resources-such as the rainforest-cannot be separated from the struggle to maintain diverse cultures, and that the causes of language death, like that of ecological destruction, lie at the intersection of ecology and politics.And while Nettle and Romaine defend the world''s endangered languages, they also pay homage to the last speakers of dying tongues, such as Red Thundercloud, a Native American in South Carolina, Ned Mandrell, with whom the Manx language passed away in 1974, and Arthur Bennett, an Australian, the last person to know more than a few words of Mbabaram. In our languages lies the accumulated knowledge of humanity. Indeed, each language is a unique window on experience. Vanishing Voices is a call to preserve this resource, before it is too late.Trade ReviewReview from previous edition "[A] superb study of endangered languages.... The tapestry of supporting detail is every bit as compelling as the central thesis-- from an examination of how indigenous languages function as museums of local culture to a history of the way in which dominant languages like English,Mandarin, and Spanish have vanquished more vulnerable tongues." * The New Yorker *"Language extinction is a great tragedy for human culture and for scholarship on all things human. This fascinating book is the latest word on this important issue, containing a wealth of knowledge and wisdom. If we have the good sense to rescue the priceless legacy of linguistic diversity before it vanishes forever, Vanishing Voices will surely deserve a good part of the credit." * Steven Pinker, author of The Language Instinct and Words and Rules *". . . this clear, cogent and immensely knowledgeable book. . . . Vanishing Voices is a book that needs to be chain-read, therefore: read it, then tell someone else to." * Prof David Crystal, THES *"Vanishing Voices is an urgent call to arms about the impending loss of one of our great resources. Nettle and Romaine paint a breathtaking landscape that shows why so many of the world's languages are disappearing and more importantly, why it matters. They put the problem of linguistic diversity into the wider context of global biodiversity, and propose the revolutionary idea that saving endangered languages is not about dictionaries and educational programs, but about preserving the cultures and habitats of the people who speak them. Along the way it's also a fascinating introduction to how language works: how languages are born, how they die, and how we can prevent their death." * Deborah Tannen, Georgetown University *a "splendid and disturbing book." * The Irish Times (Dublin) *Table of Contents1. Where have All the Languages Gone ; 2. A World of Diversity ; 3. Lost Words / Lost Worlds ; 4. The Ecology of Language ; 5. The Biological Wave ; 6. The Economic Wave ; 7. Why Something Should be Done ; 8. Sustainable Futures ; References and Further Reading ; Bibliography ; Index

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Book SynopsisThis revised edition of Deborah Tannen''s first discourse analysis book, Conversational Style-first published in 1984-presents an approach to analyzing conversation that later became the hallmark and foundation of her extensive body of work in discourse analysis, including the monograph Talking Voices, as well as her well-known popular books You Just Don''t Understand, That''s Not What I Meant!, and Talking from 9 to 5, among others. Carefully examining the discourse of six speakers over the course of a two-and-a-half hour Thanksgiving dinner conversation, Tannen analyzes the features that make up the speakers'' conversational styles, and in particular how aspects of what she calls a ''high-involvement style'' have a positive effect when used with others who share the style, but a negative effect with those whose styles differ. This revised edition includes a new preface and an afterword in which Tannen discusses the book''s place in the evolution of her work. Conversational Style isTrade ReviewPraise for earlier edition: "By far the most interesting and accessible--and fun!--introduction to conversational style that I know of. Students love it, and I use it as a required textbook whenever I teach sociolinguistics."--Doug Biber, Northern Arizona UniversityPraise for earlier edition: "Interesting and valuable for both laypersons and students."--LanguagePraise for earlier edition: "A contribution not only for the general reader but for any researcher or student interested in conversation."--Language and SocietyTable of ContentsREFERENCES; AUTHOR INDEX; SUBJECT INDEX

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