General

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...

Much of today's communication is carried out through various kinds of humor, and we therefore need to be able to understand its many aspects. Here, two of the world's leading pioneers in humor studies, Alleen and Don Nilsen, explore how humor can be...

What makes a speech community? How do they evolve? How are speech communities identified? Speech communities are central to our understanding of how language and interactions occur in societies around the world and in this book readers will find an...

Bilingual language behaviour is driven by numerous factors that are usually studied in isolation, even though individual factors never operate alone. Bringing together key insights from psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, Luna Filipovic presents a...

Bilingual language behaviour is driven by numerous factors that are usually studied in isolation, even though individual factors never operate alone. Bringing together key insights from psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, Luna Filipovic presents a...

This book provides a fresh approach to Singapore English, by focusing on its cultural connotations. The author, a native Singaporean, explores a range of aspects of this rich variety of English - including address forms, cultural categories, particles...

How does writing relate to speech? What impact does it have on social organisation and development? How do unwritten languages differ from those that have a written form and tradition? This book is a general account of the place of writing in society...

Bringing together a team of renowned international scholars, this volume provides a wide-ranging collection of historical and state-of-the-art perspectives on language regard, particularly in the context of language variation and language change, and...

In the online world, people argue about anything and everything - religion is no exception. Stephen Pihlaja investigates how several prominent social media figures present views about religion in an environment where their positions are challenged. The...

Ian Roberts offers a stimulating introduction to our greatest gift as a species: our capacity for articulate language. We are mostly as blissfully unaware of the intricacies of the structure of language as fish are of the water they swim in. We live in a...

From the barbed, childish taunt on the school playground, to the eloquent sophistry of a lawyer prising open a legal loophole in a court of law, meaning arises each time we use language to communicate with one another. How we use language - to convey...

While other books focus on special internet registers, like tweets or texting, no previous study describes the full range of everyday registers found on the searchable web. These are the documents that readers encounter every time they do a Google...