The increasing reliance of our educational system on standardized tests has precipitated a national debate. This debate, however, has proceeded with little attention to the tests themselves. This book makes a scholarly contribution to the debate by using the methods of discourse analysis to examine not only representative material from reading tests but also children's responses to it. The book is particularly attentive to the role of culture in shaping children's understanding of what they read.

t his book applies recently developed tools in strong and weak bidirectional op- mality theory (ot ) as well as an evolutionary modeling of ot in a bidirectional setting to the empirical domain of negation across a wide range of languages. I have long been intrigued by the patterns of semantic variation we find in natural l- guage, and negation has always been one of the topics I was fascinated by. In the past, I have proposed analyses of language-specific observations about not...until in English (de swart 1996), Dutch negative polarity items (n PIs) occurring outside the c-command domain of the licensor (de swart 1998b), the interaction of negation and aspect in French (de swart and Molendijk 1999), scope ambiguities with negative quantifiers in g ermanic (de swart 2000), and negative concord in r omance (de swart and sag 2002). a lthough I felt my proposals were contributing to a better understanding of the phenomena under consideration, they did not lead to an explanatory theory of cross-linguistic variation in the area of negation. Meanwhile, the discussion of semantic universals and cross-linguistic variation in meaning assumed more imp- tance in the literature (cf. von Fintel and Matthewson 2008), which made it all the more urgent to develop such a theory. o ther proposals came along in the literature, exploiting syntactic and lexical notions of variation, and making claims about u- versal grammar and typological generalizations.

In this edited collection, authors from various academic, cultural, racial, linguistic, and personal backgrounds use critical discourse analysis as a conceptual framework and method to examine social inequities, identity issues, and linguistic discrimination faced by historically oppressed groups in schools and society. Language, Race, and Power in Schools unravels the ways and degrees to which these groups have faced and resisted oppression, and draws on critical discourse analysis to examine how multiple forms of oppression intersect. This volume interrogates areas of discrimination and injustice and discusses possibilities of developing coalitions and concerted efforts across the lines of diversity.

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies, which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics. For further publications in English linguistics see also our Dialects of English book series. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Natalie Fecher.

This book presents a comprehensive overview of the field of Community Interpreting. It caters for interpreters, interpreting students, educators and researchers and other professionals who work with interpreters. The book explores the relationship between research, training and practice. It reviews the main theoretical concepts and research results; it describes the main issues surrounding the practice and the training of interpreters, highlighting the voices of the different key participants; and it identifies areas of much needed research to provide relevant answers to those issues.

Brummett addresses the question of how the aesthetic experience of machines can have rhetorical influence. He develops a theory of machine aesthetics, showing nine dimensions of the aesthetic experience of machines and machine-like objects or activities. He identifies three general types of machine aesthetics: Mechtech, classical machine aesthetics based on hardware, gears, pistons, and so forth; Electrotech, high technology machine aesthetics based on the ability of electricity to put machinery on the human scale; and Chaotech, the aesthetic appeal of the decayed machine. In each case, rhetorical applications of the aesthetic are explored. A final critical application shows how the film "Brazil" warns its audience that fascism can be supported by simulations based on machine aesthetics.

Brummett's book develops and articulates ideas in the fields of rhetoric and literature that have not been brought together before. In a radical departure, Brummett sees machines not as passive backdrops to human intercourse, but rather as possessing a powerful rhetoric of their own. The book will be of great interest to scholars and students of communications, art, and aesthetics.

SLA literature tends to focus predominantly on what motivates language learners, but what demotivates them has not been widely discussed. This book, focusing exclusively on demotivation, will help readers to understand motivational issues from a different perspective. The aims of the work are threefold: to present the current developments of demotivation research in the field of SLA and bridge motivational theory/research and demotivation research; to promote the understanding of possible causes of demotivation; and to expand the focus of demotivation research through a reflection on current motivation theory/research and a discussion of methodological issues. The research presented in this book is situated in Japanese English-teaching contexts and will serve as a foundation for anyone wishing to better understand the causes of demotivation in SLA and to explore the topic in their own contexts.

Locality in WH Quantification argues that Logical Form, the level that mediates between syntax and semantics, is derived from S-structure by local movement. The primary data for the claim of locality at LF is drawn from Hindi but English data is used in discussing the semantics of questions and relative clauses. The book takes a cross-linguistic perspective showing how the Hindi and English facts can be brought to bear on the theory of universal grammar. There are several phenomena generally thought to involve long-distance dependencies at LF, such as scope marking, long-distance list answers and correlatives. In this book they are handled by explicating novel types of local relationships that interrogative and relative clauses can enter. A more articulated semantics is shown leading to a simpler syntax. Among other issues addressed is the switch from uniqueness/maximality effects in single wh constructions to list readings in multiple wh constructions. These effects are captured by adapting the treatment of wh expressions as quantifying over functions to the cases of multiple wh questions and correlatives. List readings due to functional dependencies are systematically distinguished from those that are based on plurality.

We easily hear and see when people are talking and writing, but we often do not understand what they are talking or writing "about." We may remain confused. This book addresses some sources of confusion in discourse and offers suggestions for diminishing it.

Building on Raymond Williams' iconic "Keywords" released in 1975, Jeffries and Walker show how some pivotal words significantly increased in use and evolved in meaning during the years of the 'New Labour' project. Focussing on print news media, this book establishes a set of socio-political keywords for the 'Blair Years', and demonstrates how their evolving meanings are indicative of the ideological landscape in Britain at that time, and the extent to which the cultural hegemony of the New Labour project influenced the language of the commentariat. Combining corpus linguistic approaches with critical stylistics the authors conduct an analysis of two newspaper corpora using computational tools. Looking closely at textually-constructed meanings within the data, their investigation of the keywords has a qualitative focus, and sets out a clear methodology for combining corpus approaches with systematic co-textual analysis.

Polysemy is a term used in semantic and lexical analysis to describe a word with multiple meanings. The problem is to establish whether its the same word with related meanings or different words that happen to look or sound the same. In 'Plainly planes plane plains plainly' how many distinct lexical items are there? Such words present few difficulties in everyday language, but pose near-intractable problems for linguists and lexicographers. The contributors, including Anna Wierzbicka, Charles Fillmore, and James Pustejovsky, consider the implications of these problems for grammatical theory and how they may be addressed in computational linguistics.

Question: What does Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" (1951) have in common with Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther" (1774)? Answer: Actually a great deal. They are classics of cult fiction and share many attributes. Cult fiction is a reader-created genre. A cult book can appear within any type of literary genre--for instance, romance, mystery, science fiction--but will achieve cult status only on the basis of reader response. It has qualities that speak to a reader, who may feel that it has been written for him or her alone; yet this very personal appeal is widespread, and such a book may grow in popularity almost as an underground movement, inspiring a generation of readers and sometimes enduring as a mainstream classic. Though amazingly diverse, such books also have astonishing commonalities pervasive enough to qualify them as comprising a genre.

"Classic Cult Fiction" is a history, analysis, and reference guide to books that have become bibles to generations of Europeans and Americans over the past two hundred years. Though canon formation is an awesome prospect, sure to lead to challenges by scholars and readers alike, author Thomas Whissen fearlessly identifies the top fifty classic cult books, first presenting an informed and witty interpretation of the phenomenon and its characteristics with examples from different cultures and periods. Cult fiction is shown to be a product of the Romantic movement and a reflection of the persistent romantic temperament in Western civilization. The work offers insights into the mentality of the Golden Age of Cult Fiction, the 1960s, by analyzing the cult books that both influenced the age and were influenced by it. The fifty individual works are each discussed relative to time and place, impact, and audience psychology and analyzed in terms of common cult attributes. A chronological listing of cult fiction adds a number of titles not chosen for the top fifty. An original approach to criticism, this literary companion argues the case for cult fiction as a distinct genre and offers fifty fresh and thought provoking essays to back up the contention.

Based on comparative analyses of diachronic data, the articles in this volume address both theoretical and methodological issues in the study of grammaticalization and lexicalization in both Eastern and Western languages. The central question raised and discussed in this volume is how, if any, typological properties of the two genetically unrelated language families interact with the processes of grammaticalization and lexicalization.

David Winton Thomas (1901-1970) was Regius Professor of Hebrew in the University of Cambridge (1938-1968) and one of the most distinguished British lexicographers of the Hebrew language. His special contribution was the identification of words in Biblical Hebrew that had lain undetected since ancient times, sometimes because they were homonyms of other, better-known words. He called his project 'The Recovery of the Ancient Hebrew Language', the title of his inaugural lecture at Cambridge in 1939, as well as of the present book. In this volume John Day has gathered together all Winton Thomas's lexicographical articles (nearly 400 pages altogether) in a convenient format; hitherto these have been scattered around many different journals and books. In addition, he has prefaced them with a very substantial introduction of some 150 pages, in which he offers the first thorough and systematic evaluation of Winton Thomas's work. Day concludes that there are definitely occasions where Thomas has made a positive and enduring contribution to Hebrew lexicography, and it is important that modern scholars do not overlook these conclusions. On the other hand, it becomes clear that Thomas was sometimes too prone to appeal to cognate Semitic languages (especially Arabic) in the search for new meanings of Hebrew words when this was unnecessary. In seeking to make a thorough appraisal of Thomas's proposals this volume offers a valuable contribution to the study of Biblical Hebrew lexicography.

In Writing Rhetorically, Jennifer Fletcher provides teachers with strategies and frameworks for writing instruction that cultivate student expertise and autonomy. By teaching writing rhetorically, we support students in becoming independent problem solvers. They learn how to discover their own questions, design their own inquiry process, develop their own positions and purposes, make their own choices about content and form, and contribute to conversations that matter to them. Inside this book, Jennifer examines the rhetorical writing skills and practices that help students effectively communicate across contexts while providing successful ways to foster: Inquiry, invention, and rhetorical thinking. Writing for transfer. Paraphrasing, summary, synthesis, and citation skills. Research skills and processes. Evidence-based reasoning. Rhetorical decision making. Rhetorical decision making helps students develop the skills, knowledge, and mindsets needed for transfer of learning: the ability to adapt and apply learning in new settings. The more choices students make as writers, the better prepared they are to analyze and respond to diverse rhetorical situations.

This study is the first to describe and analyze prosodic orientation, a conversational strategy by which speakers design their speaking voice according to the vocal patterns used by their conversational partners. The analyses are based on instances of natural everyday talk. The book explores forms and functions of prosodic orientation, and offers a new perspective on prosody in conversation.

"Vocabulary and Writing in a First and Second Language" is based on a large-scale empirical study. The innovative feature of the research was that the same students were asked to do the same tasks in both languages while reporting their thinking as they went along. Furthermore, they had to undertake the same tasks even though they were of very different experience, ranging from young children at school to university students. Three areas of learners' competencies and skills were explored: vocabulary knowledge, word guessing strategies and writing. The authors further explore the relationship between the skills and describe the level of development for individual learners within the three areas. In all cases, statistical and qualitative analyses are offered, the latter being based on the learners' own 'think-aloud' reports. Both researchers and teachers of language will find this in-depth approach useful in understanding the processes of both first and second language performance.

No one knows more about comedy than Steve Allen. For more than five decades as a writer, performer, and keen observer of the social scene, he has looked into every aspect of who's funny, what's funny, and why. Allen shares his discoveries in How to Be Funny, the book designed to help everyone develop their special talent for funniness.
Now reissued in paperback, How to Be Funny covers all the basics, including joke telling, ad-libbing, writing humorously, performing comedy, emceeing, and much more. Allen takes you inside the world of comedy, from the early writings of Mark Twain, to the more contemporary work of Rodney Dangerfield and Bill Maher. Allen even provides homework assignments for the budding comic
Yet How to Be Funny is far more than just a book for aspiring comedians it will help anyone who wants to be a more amusing conversationalist, a more effective public speaker, and everyone who just wants to be the life of the party.

The way speakers in multilingual contexts develop own varieties in their interactions sheds light on code switching and multimodal dynamic co-constructions of grammar in use. This volume explores the intersection of multimodality and language use of multilingual speakers. Firstly, theoretical frames are discussed and empirical studies involving Catalan, German and Spanish as L1, L2 or FL are presented interconnecting verbal and gestural modalities into grammar description or exploring actions as sources for gestures, which may nonverbally represent the argument in German dynamic motion verbs. Other chapters focus on positionings in interviews, lexical access searches or proxemics in greetings and farewells. The contributions secondly focus on verbal features of language use in multilingual contexts related to self-representation and co-construction of identity through code-switching, deixis or argumentative reasoning in different communicative events based on multilingual data of languages including Croatian, English, Italian, Brazilian-Portuguese and Polish. The findings call for a reviewed conception of grammar description with implications also for the conceptualization of deixis, for L2/foreign language acquisition and language teaching policies.

This monograph first presents a method of diagramming argument macrostructure, synthesizing the standard circle and arrow approach with the Toulmin model. A theoretical justification of this method through a dialectical understanding of argument, a critical examination of Toulmin on warrants, a thorough discussion of the linked-convergent distinction, and an account of the proper reconstruction of enthymemes follows.

Combining a fresh, previously unexplored view of the subject with a detailed overview of the past and ongoing philosophical discussion on the matter, this book investigates the phenomenon of semantic under-determinacy by seeking an answer to the questions of how it can be explained, and how communication is possible despite it.

This book examines how word order variations in language can be regulated by various factors in cyclic syntax. In particular, it offers a valuable contribution to the current debate concerning the effect of cyclic Spell-out on the (re-)ordering of elements in scrambling. Heejeong Ko provides in-depth discussion of the interaction of the syntax-phonology interface with operations at the syntax proper, as well as examining how the semantic meaning of a structure can be correlated with certain types of orderings in cyclic edges of the syntax. The author's proposal accounts for a wide range of scrambling data in East Asian languages such as Korean and Japanese, with particular focus on the consequences of cyclic linearization for (sub-)scrambling, types of quantifier floating, variations in predicate fronting, and types of argument structure and secondary predicates. The book will be of interest to syntacticians from graduate level upwards, particularly those interested in the syntax-phonology and syntax-semantics interfaces. The range of novel data presented will make it a valuable resource for linguists studying Korean, Japanese, and scrambling languages in general.

Rooted in Gricean tradition, this book concentrates on game- and decision-theoretic (GDT) approaches to the foundations of pragmatics. An introduction to GDT, an overview of GDT pragmatics research to date, its relation to semantics and to Gricean pragmatics are followed by contributions offering a high-level survey of current GDT pragmatics and the field of its applications, demonstrating that this approach provides a sound basis for synchronic and diachronic explanations of language use.

Taking three different perspectives, this book looks at primary school children's language learning motivation and language attitudes. In adopting a longitudinal perspective, the book fills a research gap and provides a macro-level analysis of motivational development over time. It reveals a surprising amount of stability in primary school children's motivational and attitudinal development. The comparative perspective looks at the learners' affective dispositions with regard to English (theorized as a 'global language') and French (theorized as a 'national language'). The comparisons between global language and national language are relevant across the world, especially in situations where instruction in languages other than English struggles to get attention. The results reveal sizeable differences between the two languages, with children being substantially more motivated to learn English than to learn French. Finally, the explanatory section identifies key antecedents of the learners' motivational and attitudinal dispositions - and thereby opens up paths for intervention relevant for those working in the field of language instruction.

Southern rhetoric is communication's oldest regional study. During its initial invention, the discipline was founded to justify the study of rhetoric in a field of white male scholars analyzing significant speeches by other white men, yielding research that added to myths of Lost Cause ideology and a uniquely oratorical culture. Reconstructing Southern Rhetoric takes on the much-overdue task of reconstructing the way southern rhetoric has been viewed and critiqued within the communication discipline. The collection reveals that southern rhetoric is fluid and migrates beyond geography, is constructed in weak counterpublic formation against legitimated power, creates a region that is not monolithic, and warrants activism and healing. Contributors to the volume examine such topics as political campaign strategies, memorial and museum experiences, television and music influences, commemoration protests, and ethnographic experiences in the South. The essays cohesively illustrate southern identity as manifested in various contexts and ways, considering what it means to be a part of a region riddled with slavery, Jim Crow laws, and other expressions of racial and cultural hierarchy. Ultimately, the volume initiates a new conversation, asking what would southern rhetorical critique be like if it included the richness of the southern culture from which it came? Contributions by Whitney Jordan Adams, Wendy Atkins-Sayre, Jason Edward Black, Patricia G. Davis, Cassidy D. Ellis, Megan Fitzmaurice, Michael L. Forst, Jeremy R. Grossman, Cynthia P. King, Julia M. Medhurst, Ryan Neville-Shepard, Jonathan M. Smith, Ashli Quesinberry Stokes, Dave Tell, and Carolyn Walcott.