General

This introductory study offers a critical overview of the major works of V. S. Naipaul from 1950 to the present day. Professor Mustafa's main concern is with literary issues, but historical, political and cultural questions are also addressed, with...

Conversations between AIDS counsellors and their clients bring delicate and potentially threatening issues into play. In this study Anssi Perakyla applies the principles of conversation analysis to his exploration of AIDS counselling, using data from...

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Nineteenth-century English can in many ways be claimed to have laid the foundations for the present-day language, but until recently it has not received as much attention from scholars of linguistics as the English of earlier periods. This book provides...

This 1992 collection takes the exciting step of examining natural language phenomena from the perspective of both computational linguistics and formal semantics. Computational linguistics has until now been primarily concerned with the construction of...

Recent sociopolitical events have profoundly changed the status and functions of German and influenced its usage. In this study (published by Cambridge in 1984) Michael Clyne revises and expands his original analysis of the German language in Language...

Margaret Masterman was a pioneer in the field of computational linguistics. Working in the earliest days of language processing by computer, she believed that meaning, not grammar, was the key to understanding languages, and that machines could determine...

Edouard Glissant is an accomplished and influential novelist and poet, and has recently emerged as a major theorist in Caribbean studies and post-colonial literature. In this first full-length study of Glissant's creative and theoretical work J. Michael...

Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy, investigates the meanings and uses of literacy in different cultures and societies. In contrast to previous studies, where the focus of research has been on aspects of cognition, education and on the economic...

Only a few centuries ago the English language consisted of a collection of dialects spoken mainly by monolinguals and only within the shores of a small island. Now the English language includes such typologically distinct varieties as pidgins and...

Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey is a comprehensive introduction to current research in all branches of the field of linguistics, from syntactic theory to ethnography of speaking, from signed language to the mental lexicon, from language acquisition to...

Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey is a comprehensive introduction to current research in all branches of the field of linguistics, from syntactic theory to ethnography of speaking, from signed language to the mental lexicon, from language acquisition to...

The theory of accommodation is concerned with motivations underlying and consequences arising from ways in which we adapt our language and communication patterns toward others. Since accommodation theory's emergence in the early l970s, it has attracted...

The theory of accommodation is concerned with motivations underlying and consequences arising from ways in which we adapt our language and communication patterns toward others. Since accommodation theory's emergence in the early l970s, it has attracted...

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Based on intensive fieldwork in an urban American junior high school, this original study explores the relationship between oral and written texts in everyday life by analysing tellings and retellings of local events, diaries, writings and discussions...

Spelling matters to people. In America and Britain every day, members of the public write to the media on spelling issues, and take part in spelling contests. In Germany, a reform of the spelling system has provoked a constitutional crisis; in Galicia, a...

Laurel Brinton's important study of the development of English aspectual systems provides an exceptionally clear and systematic account of an area of syntax and semantics that continues to be the subject of both terminological and notional confusion. Not...

More than forty years ago it was demonstrated that the African continent can be divided into four distinct language families. Research on African languages has accordingly been preoccupied with reconstructing and understanding similarities across these...

Reported speech, whereby we quote the words of others, is used in many different types of interaction. In this revealing study, a team of leading experts explore how reported speech is designed, the actions it is used to perform, and how it fits into the...

Pragmatics - the way we communicate using more than just language - is particularly problematic for people with speech disorders. Through an extensive analysis of how pragmatics can go wrong, this 2007 book not only provides a clinically useful account...

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In studying discourse, the problem for the linguist is to find a fruitful level of analysis. Carlota Smith offers a new approach with this study of discourse passages, units of several sentences or more. She introduces the key idea of the 'Discourse...

Standard English has evolved and developed in many ways over the past hundred years. From pronunciation to vocabulary to grammar, this concise survey clearly documents the recent history of Standard English. Drawing on large amounts of authentic corpus...

Memory-based language processing - a machine learning and problem solving method for language technology - is based on the idea that the direct reuse of examples using analogical reasoning is more suited for solving language processing problems than the...

Fluent aphasia is a language disorder that follows brain damage, causing difficulty in finding the correct words and structuring sentences. Speakers also experience problems in understanding language, severely impairing their ability to communicate. In...

This book presents a comprehensive study of how children acquire complex sentences. Drawing on observational data from English-speaking children aged 2 to 5, Holger Diessel investigates the acquisition of infinitival and participial complement clauses,...

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This book investigates, from a linguistic point of view, how rural migrants adjust to an urban environment. The focus of Dr Bortoni-Ricardo's study is speakers of Caipira, a dialect of Brazilian Portuguese, who moved into a satellite city of Brasilia...

New Zealand English - at just 150 years old - is one of the newest varieties of English, and is unique in that its full history and development are documented in extensive audio-recordings. The rich corpus of spoken language provided by New Zealand's...

This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to the relations between power and language. Many societies are 'multilingual' throughout their history, but there is often a hierarchical ordering of their languages, dialects and ways of speaking. These are...

This authoritative collection examines both language contacts in Scandinavia proper and also contacts with non-Scandinavian languages. The language situation in Scandinavia is a rich and complex one, yet hitherto little of the material has been available...

When healthcare providers and patients do not speak the same language, medical interpreters are called in to help. In this book - the first ever ethnographic study of a bilingual hospital - Claudia Angelelli explores the role of medical interpreters,...

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This book uses Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory to show that connectivity in discourse is a pragmatic rather than a semantic matter: it results from relevance relations between text and context rather than from relations linguistically encoded in...

This collection of essays is a major contribution to the study of oral composition and ritual communication, and in particular to the use of 'parallelism' (the poetic ordering of words and phrases in alternative, duplicate form). The introduction by...

In central cases of switch-reference, a marker on the verb of one clause is used to indicate whether its subject has the same or different reference from the subject of an adjacent, syntactically related clause. In central cases of logophoricity, a...

This textbook deals with the grammatical category of person, which covers the first person, the second person, and the third person. Drawing on data from over 700 languages, Anna Siewierska compares the use of person within and across different...

First Language Attrition examines linguistic aspects of the attrition or loss of first language abilities in bilinguals through a collection of studies in various language groups. The phenomena of attrition are examined at both the individual bilingual...

Yoruba, a major West African language spoken by over twelve million people, has had so much scholarly attention before the release of this 1966 work, but no extensive descriptive grammar had ever been published. Dr Ayo Bamgbose therefore made a major...