In the early 1900s, the language of America was becoming colloquial English-the language of the businessman, manager, and professional. Since college and high school education were far from universal, many people turned to correspondence education-that era's distance learning-to learn the art of speaking and writing. By the 1920s and 1930s, thousands of Americans were sending coupons from newspapers and magazines to order Sherwin Cody's 100% Self-correcting Course in the English Language, a patented mail-order course in English that was taken by over 150,000 people.
Cody's ubiquitous signature advertisement, which ran for over forty years, promised a scientifically-tested invention that improved speaking and writing in just 15 minutes a day. Cody's ad explained that people are judged by their English, and he offered self-improvement and self-confidence through the mail.
In this book, linguist Edwin Battistella tells the story of Sherwin Cody and his famous English course, situating both the man and the course in early twentieth century cultural history. The author shows how Cody became a businessman-a writer, grammatical entrepreneur, and mass-marketer whose ads proclaimed "Good Money in Good English" and asked "Is Good English Worth 25 Cents to You?" His course, perhaps the most widely-advertised English education program in history, provides a unique window onto popular views of language and culture and their connection to American notions of success and failure. But Battistella shows Sherwin Cody was also part of a larger shift in attitudes. Using Cody's course as a reference point, he also looks at the self-improvement ethic reflected in such courses and products as theHarvard Classics, The Book of Etiquette, the Book-of-the-Month Club, the U.S. School of Music, and the Charles Atlas and Dale Carnegie courses to illustrate how culture became popular and how self-reliance evolved into self-improvement.

When we watch and listen to actors speaking lines that have been written by someone else-a common experience if we watch any television at all-the illusion of "people talking" is strong. These characters are people like us, but they are also different, products of a dramatic imagination, and the talk they exchange is not quite like ours.
Television Dramatic Dialogue examines, from an applied sociolinguistic perspective, and with reference to television, the particular kind of "artificial" talk that we know as dialogue: onscreen/on-mike talk delivered by characters as part of dramatic storytelling in a range of fictional and nonfictional TV genres. As well as trying to identify the place which this kind of language occupies in sociolinguistic space, Richardson seeks to understand the conditions of its production by screenwriters and the conditions of its reception by audiences, offering two case studies, one British (Life on Mars) and one American (House).

This book analyses the communicative structure of interpersonal, or casual, conversation. The author shows how the balance of conversation can be upset by variations in the status of the participants during the conversation and how the participants frequently adopt the strategy of negatively evaluating non-present third persons to redress the balance. The repair of such interactional trouble motivates topic change and major topic movement. The author uses transcripts of actual recorded conversations thus providing extensive support for her observations and analysis. Christine Cheepen is currently a Research Fellow in Articial Intelligence at the Hatfield Polytechnic, U.K. Her abiding interest is in linguistics, - in particular the study of natural conversation, and she has recently been involved in research connected with various computational projects. She has combined these two areas of interest, and is presently working primarily on aspects of dialogue in the human/machine interface.

Yiddish, the language of Eastern-European Jews, has so far been mostly described as Germanic within the framework of the traditional, divergence-based Language Tree Model. Meanwhile, advances in contact linguistics allow for a new approach, placing the idiom within the mixed language spectrum, with the Slavic component playing a significant role. So far, the Slavic elements were studied as isolated, adstratal borrowings. This book argues that they represent a coherent system within the grammar. This suggests that the Slavic languages had at least as much of a constitutive role in the inception and development of Yiddish as German and Hebrew. The volume is copiously illustrated with examples from the vernacular language. With a contribution of Anna Pilarski, University of Szczecin.

Japanese is definitely one of the best-known languages in typological literature. For example, typologists often assume that Japanese is a nominative-accusative language. However, it is often overlooked that Japanese, or more precisely, Tokyo Japanese, is just one of various local varieties of the Japonic language family (Japanese and Ryukyuan). In fact, the Japonic languages exhibit a surprising typological diversity. For example, some varieties display a split-intransitive as opposed to nominative-accusative system. The present volume is thus a unique attempt to explore the typological diversity of Japonic by providing a collection of grammatical sketches of various local varieties, four from Japanese dialects and five from Ryukyuan. Each grammatical sketch follows the same descriptive format, addressing a wide range of typological topics.

This book presents an empirically based examination of language patterns found among the Israeli Druze community, which is profiled against that of the Arabs in Israel. The results document the emergence of a mixed language previously undescribed and provides a socio-political analysis. This study intends thus to make a contribution to the debate on "mixed languages", introducing a model that facilitates the analysis of the link bewteen codeswitching and sociopolitical identity. Special attention is paid to the assessment of language and identity issues of Golan Heights Druze and Israeli Druze, taking into exam two major political debates within these communities, regarding the Israeli Nation-state Law and the so-called ‘Syrian–Israeli secret Golan deal’ speculation.

From rethinking feminist archives, to inserting postpornography in academia, to approaching sex toys from a transpositive perspective, to dismantling the foundations of techno-capitalism, the areas of inquiry in this book are lenses through which to explore the relationships between genders, bodies and technologies. All the various chapters work to reimagine the body as a hybrid, malleable and subversive source of potentiality. These essays offer readers road maps for unimagined and uncharted social scapes: the relationship between bodies-technologies-genders means working within a space of monstrosity. Through this embodied discomfort the book questions existing techno-social norms, and imagines tranfeminist futures. Contributors are: Carlotta Cossutta, Valentina Greco, Arianna Mainardi, Stefania Voli, Lucia Egana Rojas, Ludovico Virtu, Angela Balzano, Obiezione Respinta, Elisa Virgili, Rachele Borghi, and Diego Marchante "Genderhacker".

This book deals with the tension between a strategy of language maintenance (protecting and reinforcing the language where it is still spoken by community members) and a strategy of language revitalization (opening up access to the language to all interested people and encouraging new domains of its use). The case study presented concerns a grammar school in Upper Lusatia, which hosts the coexistence of a community of Upper Sorbian-speakers and a group of German native speakers who are learning Upper Sorbian at school. The tensions between these two groups studying at the same school are presented in this book against the background of various language strategies, practices and ideologies. The conflict of interests between the “traditional� community which perceives itself as the “guardians� of the minority language and its potential new speakers is played off on different levels by policy-makers and may be read through different levels of language policy and planning.

This book exemplifies that research into linguistic and cultural diversity not only contributes to the reduction of unjust human relations, but also has its own added value in creating and exposing new connections, relationships, identities, and communities through intercultural communication. It is not a handbook but offers nine studies that illustrate the reflection process from different scholarly perspectives. The approaches in this volume are interaction approach, contrastive approach, cultural representation approach, multilingualism approach and transfer approach including research into intercultural competences. Together, the chapters illustrate the essence of the essentialism and non-essentialism debate regarding diversity and inclusion.

What do you do when you are a newcomer in a cultural group and you must find your way? From the perspective of an ethnographer of communication, one of the most effective strategies you can take is to go from the inside out. Exploring Cultural Communication from the Inside Out: An Ethnographic Toolkit is a workbook that offers readers a hands-on approach to navigating new cultural environments. The text helps readers develop richer and more nuanced understandings not only of the different cultures they are members of but also their own roles in an increasingly multicultural and global society. The book is grounded in an interpretive theoretical/methodological framework of the ethnography of communication and speech codes theory, and guides readers through the process of applying this framework to any setting of their choice. Throughout, the text introduces theoretical concepts and pairs them with applied activities that require readers to engage in ethical fieldwork, data collection, and analysis. Readers are then challenged to document their experience, communicate what they have learned, and participate in deep reflection. Featuring a unique methodology and highly practical information, Exploring Cultural Communication from the Inside Out is exemplary for courses in intercultural communication, language and culture, sociolinguistics, and communication research.

Is the relation between gestures and language conventionalized? Is it possible to investigate the backgrounds of the users by means of these gestures? This book offers an in-depth analysis and description of five recurrent gestures used by Hausa speakers from northern Nigeria, examined from a cross-cultural perspective. The method based on studying naturalistic data available online (sermons, interviews and talk shows) can be applied to other languages with no speech corpora. Particular attention is paid to cultural practices and routinized behavior that affect both the form of a gesture and its meaning. Everyday activities, such as greetings and religious rituals, as well as social hierarchy and gender differences are reflected in gestures. The results show that gestures and language reveal the shared cultural background of the speakers and reflect identical cognitive processes.

Nobody can deny that an account of grammatical change that takes written contact into consideration is a significant challenge for any theoretical perspective. Written contact of earlier periods or from a diachronic perspective mainly refers to contact through translation. The present book includes a diachronic dimension in the study of written language contact by examining aspects of the history of translation as related to grammatical changes in English and Greek in a contrastive way. In this respect, emphasis is placed on the analysis of diachronic retranslations: the book examines translations from earlier periods of English and Greek in relation to various grammatical characteristics of these languages in different periods and in comparison to non-translated texts.

Changing practices and perceptions of parenthood and family life have long been the subject of intense public, political and academic attention. Recent years have seen growing interest in the role digital media and technologies can play in these shifts, yet this topic has been under-explored from a discourse analytical perspective. In response, this book's investigation of everyday parenting, family practices and digital media offers a new and innovative exploration of the relationship between parenting, family practices, and digitally mediated connection. This investigation is based on extensive digital and interview data from research with nine UK-based single and/or lesbian, gay or bisexual parents who brought children into their lives in non-traditional ways, for example through donor conception, surrogacy or adoption. Through a novel approach that combines constructivist grounded theory with mediated discourse analysis, this book examines connected family lives and practices in a way that transcends the limiting social, biological and legal structures that still dominate concepts of family in contemporary society.

In The Interpersonal Metafunction in 1 Corinthians 1-4, James D. Dvorak offers a linguistic-critical discourse analysis of 1 Cor 1-4 utilizing Appraisal Theory, a model rooted in the modern sociolinguistic paradigm known as Systemic-Functional Linguistics. This work is concerned primarily with the interpersonal meanings encoded in the text and how they pertain to the act of resocialization. Dvorak pays particular attention to the linguistics of appraisal in Paul's language to determine the values with which Paul expects believers in Christ to align. This book will be of great value to biblical scholars and students with interests in biblical Greek, functional linguistics, appraisal theory, hermeneutics, exegesis, and 1 Corinthians.

The relationship between language and identity is a complex topic everywhere in the world, but maybe it is even more crucial for those people living in the Balkans who speak a Romance variety. This volume is the result of a project started by the Balkan History Association, and brings together scholars trained in social sciences and humanities to offer the reader a thorough sociolinguistic and anthropological account of this region. It constitutes a contribution to a reformulation of methodological and analytical issues, providing a better insight in the linguistic and geopolitical processes taking place in the area. Contributors are Michael Studemund-Halevy, Catalin Mamali, Anna-Christine Weirich, Ewa Nowicka, Daniela-Carmen Stoica, Mircea Maran, Zvjezdana Vrzic, and Monica Hutanu.

This volume offers comprehensive analyses of how we live continuously in a multiplicity and simultaneity of 'places'. It explores what it means to be in place, the variety of ways in which meanings of place are made and how relationships to others are mediated through the linguistic and material semiotics of place. Drawing on examples of linguistic landscapes (LL) over the world, such as gentrified landscapes in Johannesburg and Brunswick, Mozambican memorializations, volatile train graffiti in Stockholm, Brazilian protest marches, Guadeloupian Creole signs, microscapes of souvenirs in Guinea-Bissau and old landscapes of apartheid in South Africa in contemporary time, this book explores how we are what we are through how we are emplaced. Across these examples, world-leading contributors explore how LLs contribute to the (re)imagining of different selves in the living past (living the past in the present), alternative presents and imagined futures. It focuses particularly on how the LL in all of these mediations is read through emotionality and affect, creating senses of belonging, precarity and hope across a simultaneous multiplicity of worlds. The volume offers a reframing of linguistics landscape research in a geohumanities framework emphasizing negotiations of self in place in LL studies, building upon a rich body of LL research. With over 40 illustrations, it covers various methodological and epistemological issues, such as the need for extended temporal engagement with landscapes, a mobile approach to landscapes and how bodies engage with texts.

Religious language is all around us, embedded in advertising, politics and news media. This book introduces readers to the field of theolinguistics, the study of religious language. Investigating the ways in which people talk to and about God, about the sacred and about religion itself, it considers why people make certain linguistic choices and what they accomplish. Introducing the key methods required for examining religious language, Valerie Hobbs acquaints readers with the most common and important theolinguistic features and their functions. Using critical corpus-assisted discourse analysis with a focus on archaic and other lexical features, metaphor, agency and intertextuality, she examines religious language in context. Highlighting its use in both expected locations, such as modern-day prayer and politics, and unexpected locations including advertising, sport, healthcare and news media, Hobbs analyses the shifting and porous linguistic boundaries between the religious and the secular. With discussion questions and further readings for each chapter, as well as a companion website featuring suggested answers to the reflection tasks, this is the ideal introduction to the study of religious language.