General

Short-term student exchanges can offer valuable opportunities for intercultural learning and to engage in intercultural communication using English (the language focus in this Element). However, research and educational practices often assume that the...

Combining theory from cognitive semantics and pragmatics, this book offers both a new model and a new usage-based method for the understanding of intersubjectivity, and how social cognition is expressed linguistically at different levels of complexity...

Writing surrounds us, it informs us, it guides us, and it controls us. The power and complexity of this exceptional human invention is a story of change. However, in today's digital world, technology has drastically altered how and where we write, what...

Writing surrounds us, it informs us, it guides us, and it controls us. The power and complexity of this exceptional human invention is a story of change. However, in today's digital world, technology has drastically altered how and where we write, what...

By exploring the associations that people make between emotions and colours, looking at how they vary across languages, and exploring the explanations that people provide for the associations that they make, this Element provides insight into the ways in...

Sociopragmatics is a rapidly growing field and this is the first ever handbook dedicated to this exciting area of study. Bringing together an international team of leading editors and contributors, it provides a comprehensive, cutting-edge overview of...

Of the approximately 7,000 languages in the world, at least half may no longer be spoken by the end of the twenty-first century. Languages are endangered by a number of factors, including globalization, education policies, and the political, economic and...

This book addresses the problem of the underrepresentation of women in politics, by examining how language use constructs and maintains inequality in political institutions. Drawing on different political genres from televised debates to parliamentary...

This Element presents and critically discusses video-mediated communication by combining theories and empirical methods of multimodal studies and translanguaging. Since Covid-19 gained momentum, video-based interactions have become more and more...

Doctors, nurses, and other caregivers often know what people with Alzheimer's disease or Asperger's 'sound like' - that is they recognise patterns in people's discourse, from sounds and silences, to words, sentences and story structures. Such discourse...

Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary (1898-1905) is the most comprehensive English dialect dictionary ever written, documenting in detail every dialect of English in the British Isles and Ireland, as well as the USA, Canada, South Africa, and other...

African American English (AAE) is a major area of research in linguistics, but until now, work has primarily been focused on AAE as it is spoken amongst the working classes. From its historical development to its contemporary context, this is the first...

How do people of faith use language to position themselves, and their beliefs and practices, in the contemporary world? This pioneering and original study looks closely at how Christians and Muslims talk to people inside and outside of their own...

To encompass the history of Arabic practice of translation, this Element re-defines translation as combination, a process of meaning-remaking that synthesizes multi reality. The Arabic translators of the Middle Ages did not simply find an equivalent to...

It is increasingly important in our globalised world for people to successfully manage interpersonal relationships. This is the first book to tackle this vital topic, by taking an interdisciplinary approach to exploring the process of relating across...

This Element examines the way that Boris Johnson's government handled the early months of the Covid crisis in the UK, with a particular focus on the role of rhetoric and communication in enacting their leadership strategy. In liberal democracies,...

During the production of spoken sentences, the linearisation of a 'thought' is accomplished via the process of grammatical encoding, i.e., the building of a hierarchical syntactic frame that fixes the linear order of lexical concepts. While much research...

Do you want to talk about the linguistic research that you think is important but you don't know where to start? Language is a topic that is relevant to everyone, and linguists are often asked to speak publicly about their research, to a range of lay...

The early modern period is a key historical era for the standardisation of languages in Europe, in which orthographies played an important role. This book traces the development of European spelling systems in the early modern era, and is unique in...

Language has played a pivotal role in societal transformation in postcolonial Africa towards the creation of globally competitive knowledge societies; however so far, this role has been under-researched and under-estimated. This volume addresses this gap...

This Element aims to address the complexity of metalinguistic awareness to achieve a thorough account of its impacts on second language (L2) reading development and promote an in-depth understanding of the factors regulating the influence of first...

In a work that is part memoir, part monograph, Nigel Duffield offers a set of lyrical reflections on theories of Psycholinguistics, which is concerned with how speakers use the languages they control, as well as with how such control is acquired in the...

Based on classic and cutting-edge research, this textbook shows how grammatical phenomena can best be taught to second language and bilingual learners. Bringing together second language research, linguistics, pedagogical grammar, and language teaching,...

What constitutes our number concept? What makes it possible for us to employ numbers the way we do; which mental faculties contribute to our grasp of numbers? What do we share with other species, and what is specific to humans? How does our language...

We often hear that our world 'is more multilingual than ever before', but is it true? This book shatters that cliché. It is the first volume to shine light on the millennia-long history of multilingualism as a social, institutional and demographic...

There has been a longstanding bias in the study of spoken language towards using writing to analyse speech. This approach is problematic in that it assumes language to be derived from an autonomous mental capacity to assemble words into sentences, while...

In this Element, the authors write about the everyday production and experiences of banal inequality. Through a series of sections, each comprising of a blogpost written for Disruptive Inequalities, and a commentary from the author on the predicaments...

Natural language occurs in time. Events happen earlier, later, or simultaneously with other events; however, this temporal dimension is often downplayed or overlooked. This Element introduces readers with a background in structural linguistics to dynamic...

Do you want to talk about the linguistic research that you think is important but you don't know where to start? Language is a topic that is relevant to everyone, and linguists are often asked to speak publicly about their research, to a range of lay...

This Element reports an investigation of translators' use of web-based resources and search engines. The study adopted a qualitative eye tracking-based methodology utilising a combination of gaze replay and retrospective think aloud (RTA) to elicit data...

Storytelling is a fundamental mode of everyday interaction. This book is based upon the Narrative Corpus (NC), a specialized corpus of naturally occurring narratives, and provides new paths for its study. Christoph Ruhlemann uses the NC's...

The study of teenagers in the classroom, and how they interact with one another and their teachers, can tell us a great deal about late-modern society. In this revealing account, Ben Rampton presents the extensive sociolinguistic research he carried out...

The British Isles are home to a vast range of different spoken and signed languages and dialects. Language continues to evolve rapidly, in its diversity, in the number and the backgrounds of its speakers, and in the repercussions it has had for political...

This landmark study examines the role of gestures in relation to speech and thought. Leading scholars, including psychologists, linguists and anthropologists, offer state-of-the-art analyses to demonstrate that gestures are not merely an embellishment of...

How do violent jihadists use language to try to persuade people to carry out violent acts? This book analyses over two million words of texts produced by violent jihadists to identify and examine the linguistic strategies employed. Taking a mixed methods...

Creoles have long been the subject of debate in linguistics, with many conflicting views, both on how they are formed, and what their political and linguistic status should be. Indeed, over the past twenty years, some creole specialists have argued that...

Traditionally, due to the availability of technology, psycholinguistic research has focused mainly on Western languages. However, this focus has recently shifted towards a more diverse range of languages, whose structures often throw into question many...

This volume of Studies in English Language focuses on the nineteenth century, an important period of both stability and change for the English language. Through ten detailed case studies, it highlights the relationships between English, its users, and...

How do we refer to people in everyday conversation? No matter the language or culture, we must choose from a range of options: full name ('Robert Smith'), reduced name ('Bob'), description ('tall guy'), kin term ('my son') etc. Our choices reflect how we...

This 2003 study uses evidence from early English verse to reconstruct the course of some central phonological changes in the history of the language. It builds on the premise that alliteration reflects faithfully the acoustic identity and similarity of...