General

Multilingualism and the Periphery is an edited volume that explores the ways in which core-periphery dynamics shape multilingualism. The research focuses on peripheral sites, which are defined by a relationship-be it geographic, political, economic etc...

Barack Obama is widely considered one of the most powerful and charismatic speakers of our age. Without missing a beat, he often moves between Washington insider talk and culturally Black ways of speaking-as shown in a famous YouTube clip, where Obama...

Language without Rights is a book-length critique of the concept of language rights. Synthesizing insights from a variety of disciplines, including linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, sociology and political philosophy, Wee demonstrates how the...

This groundbreaking book offers a new and compelling perspective on the structure of human language. The fundamental issue it addresses is the proper balance between syntax and semantics, between structure and derivation, and between rule systems and...

Every two weeks the world loses another indigenous language. Evolving over hundreds or even thousands of years, distinct languages are highly complex and extremely adaptable, but they are also more fragile and endangered than we might expect. Of the...

This volume offers a representative selection of Sally McConnell-Ginet's publications on language, gender and sexuality, which circle around the following themes: language users are actively engaged in making meanings, both as speakers and listeners;...

Arabic, Self, and Identity uses autoethnography, autobiography, and a detailed study of names to investigate the links between conflict and displacement, and between the Self and group identity. In the process it raises questions about trauma and...

Akkadian is one of the earliest attested languages and the oldest recorded Semitic language. It exists in written record between 2500BC and 500BC, much of it in letters and reports concerned with domestic and business matters, and written in colloquial...

Foreigners often say that English language is "easy." A language like Spanish is challenging in its variety of verb endings (the verb speak is conjugated hablo, hablas, hablamos), and gender for nouns, whereas English is more straight forward (I speak,...

Digital Discourse offers a distinctly sociolinguistic perspective on the nature of language in digital technologies. It starts by simply bringing new media sociolinguistics up to date, addressing current technologies like instant messaging,...

In this book, leading linguists explore the empirical scope of syntactic theory, by concentrating on a set of phenomena for which both syntactic and nonsyntactic analyses initially appear plausible. Exploring the nature of such phenomena permits a deeper...

This book introduces the principles and practice of writing a comprehensive reference grammar. Several thousand distinct languages are currently spoken across the globe, each with its own grammatical system and its own selection of diverse grammatical...

This book focuses on the relationship between syntax and meaning. Terje Lohndal's core claim is that it is possible to create a transparent mapping from syntax to logical form such that each syntactic Spell-Out domain directly corresponds to a conjunct...

This book explores the nature of finiteness, one of most commonly used notions in descriptive and theoretical linguistics but possibly one of the least understood. Scholars representing a variety of theoretical positions seek to clarify what it is and to...

Setting the thought of Robert Grosseteste within the broader context of the intellectual, religious, and social movements of his time, this study elucidates the evolution of his ideas on topics ranging from the mathematical laws that govern the movement...

Scientific evidence for the origin of speech is abundant, but evidence for the origin of language as separate from speech as a naming system remains speculative. What evidence can be utilized that will furnish relevant insights on the origin or language?...

This book introduces generative grammar as an area of study and asks what it tells us about the human mind. Wolfram Hinzen lays the foundation for the unification of modern generative linguistics with the philosophies of mind and language. He introduces...

Behavior and Culture in One Dimension adopts a broad interdisciplinary approach, presenting a unified theory of sequences, their functions and an overview of how they underpin the evolution of complexity. Sequences of DNA guide the functioning of the...

The study of childhood deafness offers researchers many interesting insights into the role of experience and sensory inputs for the development of language and cognition. This volume provides a state of the art look at these questions and how they are...

Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics is one of the most influential texts of the 20th-century - an astonishing feat for what is, at heart, a series of deeply technical lectures about the structure of human languages. What the Course's...

This volume explores the cognitive neuroscience of second language acquisition from the perspectives of critical/sensitive periods, maturational effects, individual differences, neural regions involved, and processing characteristics. The research...

Across many social and commercial domains, governments regulate the official names used to identify individuals, groups, places, companies & products, and even diseases. This innovative volume investigates the relationship between names and the law, with...

As the most restrictive language policy context in the United States, Arizona's monolingual and prescriptive approach to teaching English learners continues to capture international attention. More than five school years after initial implementation,...

A pioneering text in its first edition, this revised publication of Cognitive Poetics offers a rigorous and principled approach to literary reading and analysis. The second edition of this seminal text features: * updated theory, frameworks, and...

About half the world's population knows and uses two or more languages in everyday life, and an increasing number of parents are raising their children bilingual. This makes a resource on what it means to become and be bilingual all the more necessary...

Phraseology is often thought of as an anomaly and a headache for language learners. However, researchers have tended to focus on just one end of the scale: fairly fixed, conventional multi-word units. Here their special status and any divergence from the...

Assuming no prior linguistics background, this introductory textbook summarises key topics and issues from workplace discourse research in a clear and accessible manner. The topics covered include how people issue directives, use humour and social talk,...

Specifically designed for linguists, this book provides an introduction to programming using Python for those with little to no experience of coding. Python is one of the most popular and widely-used programming languages as it's also available for free...

What makes a good language teacher? This up-to-date, practical book addresses that question from a 'human' perspective, recognising that teachers are not just machines, but have feelings, needs and identities of their own. As the twenty-two topics of the...

In applied linguistics, being explicit about ontologies of English, and how they underpin educational ideologies and professional practices, is essential. For the first time, this volume presents a critical examination of the ways in which English is...

Were Stone-Age languages really more complex than their modern counterparts? Was Basque actually once spoken over all of Western Europe? Were Welsh-speaking slaves truly responsible for the loss of English morphology? This latest collection of Peter...

A comprehensive introduction to how people learn second languages (L2s), this textbook approaches the topic through five problems the L2 learner has to solve: 'breaking into' the L2; associating forms with meanings; learning sentence structure; learning...

Why in the early 1970s does The Times reject the idea of a national lottery, as rewarding luck not merit and effort, but warmly welcome one by the 1990s? Why in the 1970s do the Daily Mail's TV reviews address serious contemporary themes such as class-...

This book offers a comprehensive linguistic analysis of contemporary US television series. Adopting an interdisciplinary and multimethodological approach, Monika Bednarek brings together linguistic analysis of the Sydney Corpus of Television Dialogue...

This multimodal approach to linguistic landscapes examines the role of linguistic and semiotic regimes in constructing landscape affect. Affect, as distinct from emotion, is object-oriented, and can be analysed in terms of structures of language and...

This singular new textbook is both an introduction to the major theories of second language acquisition and a practical proposal for their application to language learning courses. It explains and evaluates these theories, and focuses on recent research...

A fully updated and expanded second edition of this flagship work, which introduces methodological techniques to carry out analyses of text varieties, and provides descriptions of the most important text varieties in English. Part I introduces an...

The global spread of English has had widespread linguistic, social, and cultural implications, affecting the lives of millions of people around the world. This textbook provides a lively and accessible introduction to world Englishes, describing...

Innovative and evidence-based, this introduction to the main concepts and issues in language teaching uses a 'key questions' structure, enabling the reader to understand how these questions have been addressed by researchers previously, and how the...

Abstract concepts are often embodied through metaphor. For example, we talk about moving through time in metaphorical terms, as if we were moving through space, allowing us to 'look back' on past events. Much of the work on embodied metaphor to date has...