What did a gongfarmer do? How is a chaperone connected to a bird of prey? What is the etymology behind cloud architect? And is there a link between secretaries and secrets? The story behind these (and many more) job titles is rarely predictable and often fascinating. In this highly original book, Alexander Tulloch examines the etymology behind a selection of trades and professions, unearthing intriguing nuggets of historical information along the way. Here you will find explanations of common surnames, such as Spencer, Hayward and Fletcher; obsolete jobs such as pardoner, cordwainer or telegraph boy; and roles for the modern era, such as wedding planner, pundit and sky marshal. Packed with additional etymological information and literary quotations, this book will appeal not only to linguists but also to anyone interested in the quirky twists and turns of meaning which have given us the job titles with which we are familiar today.

An interdisciplinary account of language and the law, this text looks at court interpreting and the nature of verbal interaction in the courtroom. Linguistic problems experienced due to personality and language factors, and the intimidating nature of legal discourse are also discussed.

George Orwell's essay examines the power of language to shape political ideas. It is about the importance of writing concisely, clearly and precisely and the dangers to our ability to think when language, especially political language, is obscured by vague, cliched phrases and hackneyed metaphors. In it, he argues that when political discourse trades clarity and precision for stock phrases, the debasement of politics follows. First published in Horizon in 1946, Orwell's essay was soon recognised as an important text, circulated by newspaper editors to their journalists and reprinted in magazines and anthologies of contemporary writing. It continues to be relevant to our own age.

This is an original, scholarly yet accessible contribution to the field of children's fiction. It focuses on gender in relation to children's fiction and the role that language plays in this relationship. Girls' and boys' reading itself is looked at, as well as the books that they encounter including the Harry Potter series, Louis Sachar's prizewinning Holes, fairy tales and school reading schemes. The book treats fiction as fiction, using as its guiding principles the multimodality of much childrens fiction; that fiction is almost always dialogic; that the feminist movement has had considerable influence on textual representations of women, men, boys and girls and that language (including what the characters say, and how, and what is said about them) is a key to the different readings of fictional texts. This will be a valuable resource for researchers in and students of linguistics, language studies and English literature.

Following the significant advance of English in Ireland during the 18th century, the restoration of Irish as the vernacular language formed a key part of a broad cultural Revival movement from the late 19th century. Many of those who fought figuratively or literally for independence learned Irish to varying degrees of success or broadly supported the aims of the Revival movement. Significant policy measures to promote Irish were adopted following independence in 1922, particularly in the fields of education, legal status and public administration. Despite decades of contestation around revitalisation, Irish continues to enjoy institutional supports denied to many other European minority languages but remains weak as a community language. Published in the centenary year of the foundation of the Irish state, this book reviews one hundred years of government policy on Irish and assesses its relative success or failure. Based on theoretical perspectives on language policy and revitalisation of minority languages, it analyses the development and implementation of Irish language initiatives in five thematic areas: speakers, the Gaeltacht, education, legislation and broadcasting. Each chapter includes an overview of the topic and a detailed case study on an aspect of it, drawing heavily on archival sources related to both the state and civil society organisations.

The volume "Language and Identity in Migration Contexts", which contains studies from different languages and migration contexts across the world, provides an excellent overview of the topic while highlighting some key elements like multilingualism, societal and educational contexts, as well as forced migration. The volume will therefore be of much interest to researchers working on these topics. (Prof. Dr. Anita Auer, Universite de Lausanne, Switzerland) The contributions to this volume shed a new light on various central topics in the discourses on language, migration and identity. The continued centrality of language on identity formation processes is underlined but it is shown that language is not a defining criterion for identity formation processes of migrants, in the context of migration or for heritage speakers in all cases. However, societal contexts play an important role in identity formation and these societal contexts themselves are strongly influenced by the ideologies that are prevalent in societies and that may be perpetuated in educational contexts. In the discussion of language, identity and migration in this volume, perspectives from the Global North are enriched by perspectives of the Global South, and the impact of media influence in migration discourse is analysed.

Die italo-brasilianische Literatur über die italienische Einwanderung in Brasilien am Ende des 19. und Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts ist ein frühes, aber bislang kaum untersuchtes Beispiel der literarischen Auseinandersetzung mit Migration und Mehrsprachigkeit. Diese Arbeit analysiert die Formen und Funktionen der Sprachmischung zwischen brasilianischem Portugiesisch und Italienisch/Talian in 20 literarischen Texten aus São Paulo und Rio Grande do Sul von den 1920er bis in die 2000er Jahre aus soziolinguistischer Perspektive. Dabei werden Theorien zur literarischen Mündlichkeit und Mehrsprachigkeit mit denen des Code-Switching verbunden und die Ergebnisse vor dem Hintergrund kulturwissenschaftlicher und soziolinguistischer Hybriditätstheorien interpretiert.