The volume provides the first systematic comparative approach to the history of forms of address in Portuguese and Spanish, in their European and American varieties. Both languages share a common history-e.g., the personal union of Philipp II of Spain and Philipp I of Portugal; the parallel colonization of the Americas by Portugal and Spain; the long-term transformation from a feudal to a democratic system-in which crucial moments in the diachrony of address took place. To give one example, empirical data show that the puzzling late spread of Sp. usted 'you (formal, polite)' and Pt. voce 'you' across America can be explained for both languages by the role of the political and military colonial administration. To explore these new insights, the volume relies on an innovative methodology, as it links traditional downstream diachrony with upstream diachronic reconstruction based on synchronic variation. Including theoretical reflections as well as fine-grained empirical studies, it brings together the most relevant authors in the field.

This book focuses on the unexplored context of contemporary Swedish comic strips as sites of innovative linguistic practices, where humor is derived from language play and creativity, often drawing from English and other European languages as well as social and regional dialects of Swedish. The overall purpose of the book is to highlight linguistic playfulness in Swedish comic strips, as an example of practices as yet unobserved and unaccounted for in theories of linguistic humor as applied to comics scholarship. The book familiarizes the reader with the Swedish language and linguistic culture as well as contemporary Swedish comic strips, with chapters focusing on specific strategies of language play and linguistic humor, such as mocking Swedish dialects and Swedish-accented foreign language usage, invoking English language popular culture, swearing in multiple languages, and turn-final code-switching to English to signal the punchline. The book will appeal to readers interested in humor, comics, or how linguistic innovation, language play, and language contact each can further the modern development of language, exemplified by the case of Swedish.

Australia is host to many languages - English, indigenous, migrant, and contact. Its multilingualism, the sociopolitical changes that have been impacting upon them, and its wide-ranging language policy efforts are well-known. What has been missing so far is a comprehensive, integrative study of the entire 'habitat' of languages - the contacts and interactions that have been taking place from the beginning of colonization to the present day with their linguistic outcomes. This book and its companion, Australia's Many Voices. Australian English - The National Language, develop and apply such an approach. The present book deals with non-mainstream varieties of English, indigenous, migrant, and contact languages. Based on census and other data to 2003, it addresses themes such as language demographics, language shift, and socio-psychological factors that bear upon it. Language change is discussed from the angle of the uprooting of indigenous languages from their original context, of transplantation, and of contact with English. Pidgins and creoles are located inside the Pacific context of the nineteenth century. This study provides an analysis of language and language-education policies to 2003 and connects this theme with the role of Australian English, the national language. It suggests that Australia's habitat is reaching a new stage of plurilingual tolerance. The book is of interest for specialists from a wide range of language and policy disciplines. Its discursive, non-technical style makes it accessible to non-specialists with no background in linguistics.

This text examines the importance of politeness in pragmatic expression and communication, making a significant contribution to the debate over whether the universal politeness theory is applicable globally regardless of cultural differences.

It was traditionally assumed that having a single official language was a necessary condition for the wellbeing of the state, particularly in France and Britain. This assumption is now questioned, and the regional languages are making, in some cases, an impressive comeback. It is the story of their decline, their survival and, more recently their efforts to re-establish themselves as effective tools of normal communication which is tackled in this book. Each language is analyzed in terms of its development from the earliest times, through its period of decline to present-day efforts at regeneration.

An introduction and research guide to onomastics the study of names, this book covers the major areas of name study in individual chapters on personal names (anthroponyms), place names (toponyms), acronyms, brand names and trade names. A final chapter treats special areas such as designations for athletic teams, musical groups, and tropical storms, names of awards and alcoholic beverages, animal names, code names, and scientific nomenclature. The wealth of topics covered in each chapter may be gleaned from a listing of their subheadings (see table of contents). Included are such fascinating subjects as pseudonyms and personalized license plates, names for retirement communities and airports, racist and ethnic slurs, eponyms, and names of diseases and syndromes. Every topic comprises a discussion of underlying principles as well as numerous illustrative examples.

Infused with linguistic interpretation, the study provides explanations based on phonetics (sounds of speech), morphology (shapes of names), syntax (place in sentence structure) and semantics (meaning). Throughout, special attention is given to classification and methodologies. The introduction clearly articulates theoretical aspects of onomastics, and a glossary of linguistic and onomastic terms appears as an appendix. Additional appendixes provide information on organizations and journals related to the field and a list of onomastic bibliographies. An extensive reference list and index complete the work. Useful as a text or reference book, The Study of Names is explicit enough to inform students of linguistics, yet clear and lively enough to be a good read for anyone interested in names and naming.

English is a global language which has spread historically through imperialism and more recently through communication networks throughout the world. In each location in which English is spoken it absorbs some of the idiosyncracies of the language native to that region, and one of the most fascinating areas of research for World Englishes is the African context. This research monograph examines English as it is spoken by the Xhosa people in South Africa, and is based primarily on an extensive spoken corpus of Xhosa English. Vivian de Klerk presents a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the historical development of this variety of English, and of English in South Africa more generally. The book outlines how the corpus of spoken Xhosa English was designed and compiled, and discusses the criteria relating to informants, the use of spoken rather than written data, and the codes and transcription conventions. The syntactic and pragmatic features of Xhosa English as demonstrated by the corpus are described in detail, and two chapters focus on the use of the discourse markers 'actually' and 'well'. The second section of this book examines the implications of the corpus findings.Vivian de Klerk looks at the implications of the use of this variety of English in educational, legal, social, cultural and everyday contexts. The final chapter of the book speculates as to the future of this fascinating variety of English in a globalised world. This cutting-edge study will be of interest to researchers in world Englishes, language variation and corpus linguistics.

Irian Jaya is the official name of the western half of New Guinea, a province of Indonesia since the 1960s. Its inhabitants are generally untouched by civilization, and most of their hundreds of native languages and cultures remain unstudied. Van Enk and de Vries gained access to one of the most isolated parts of Irian Jaya in order to study the Korowai, a tribe in southern Irian Jaya. The Korowai still use stone tools, live in tree-houses, and have no knowledge of the outside world. Van Enk and de Vries provide the first study of the Korowai language and culture. They reproduce oral texts that show patterns of grammar, discourse, and culture, and discuss the phonological, morphological, and syntactical aspects of the language. In the process, van Enk and de Vries reveal a number of key semantic fields and conceptual patterns such as kinship, counting, the role of lunar phases, and Korowai cosmology.

Peter Trudgill looks at why human societies at different times and places produce different kinds of language. He considers how far social factors influence language structure and compares languages and dialects spoken across the globe, from Vietnam to Nigeria, Polynesia to Scandinavia, and from Canada to Amazonia. Modesty prevents Pennsylvanian Dutch Mennonites using the verb wotte ('want'); stratified society lies behind complicated Japanese honorifics; and a mountainous homeland suggests why speakers of Tibetan-Burmese Lahu have words for up there and down there. But culture and environment don't explain why Amazonian Jarawara needs three past tenses, nor why Nigerian Igbo can make do with eight adjectives, nor why most languages spoken in high altitudes do not exhibit an array of spatial demonstratives. Nor do they account for some languages changing faster than others or why some get more complex while others get simpler. The author looks at these and many other puzzles, exploring the social, linguistic, and other factors that might explain them and in the context of a huge range of languages and societies. Peter Trudgill writes readably, accessibly, and congenially. His book is jargon-free, informed by acute observation, and enlivened by argument: it will appeal to everyone with an interest in the interactions of language with culture, environment, and society.

The importance of emotion in everyday interactions has become a central topic of research in a wide variety of disciplines, including linguistics, sociology, social psychology, anthropology, and communication. Emotion in Interaction offers a collection of original studies that explore emotion in naturally occurring spoken interaction. The articles examine both the verbal and non-verbal resources for expressing emotional stance (lexicon, syntax, prosody, laughter, crying, facial expression), the emotional aspects of action sequences (e.g. news delivery and conflicts), and the role of emotions in institutional interaction (medical consultations, psychotherapy, health visiting and helpline calls). What unites the articles is an understanding of the expression of emotion and the construction of emotional stances as a process that both shapes and is shaped by the interactional context.

This volume covers the language situation in Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique and South Africa explaining the linguistic diversity, the historical and political contexts and the current language situation, including language-in-education planning, the role of the media, the role of religion, and the roles of non-indigenous languages. The authors are indigenous and have been participants in the language planning context.

Australia's English raises many questions among experts and the general public. What is it like? How has English changed by being transplanted to other parts of the world? Does the rise of AusE and other varieties endanger the role of English as a world language? Past studies have often been selective, focusing on the esoteric and non-typical, and ignoring the contact situation in which Australian English has developed. This book and its companion, Australia's Many Voices. Ethnic Englishes, Indigenous and Migrant Languages. Policy and Education, develop and apply a comprehensive andintegrative approach that anchors English in the entire 'habitat' of Australia's languages that it both upset and transformed. Based on a wide range of data and on the assumption that all manifestations of Australian English must cohere as a system, this book retraces the social, psycholinguistic and linguistic history of the language. It locates the contact with indigenous and migrant languages and with American English in the appropriate sociohistorical context and shows how several layers of migration have shaped it. As it stratified, it was gradually accepted and developed into a fully-fledged national variety or epicentre of English that could be raised to the status of national language. Implications on educational policy and attempts to reach out into the Asia-Pacific region have followed logically from national status. The study is of interest for specialists of English and Australian Studiesas well as a range of other disciplines. Its discursive, non-technical style and presentation makes it accessible to non-specialists with no background in linguistics.

This volume presents evidence about how we understand communication in changing times, and proposes that such understandings may contribute to the development of pedagogy for teaching and learning. It expands current debates on multilingualism, asking which signs are in use and in action, and what are their social, political, and historical implications. The volume s starting-point is Bakhtin s heteroglossia, a key concept in understanding the tensions, conflicts, and multiple voices within, among, and between those signs. The chapters provide illuminating accounts of language practices as they bring into play, both in practice and in pedagogy, voices which index students localities, social histories, circumstances, and identities. The book documents the performance of linguistic repertoires in an era of profound social change caused by the shifting nature of nation-states, increased movement of people across territories, and growing digital communication.

Our thinking on language and multilingualism is expanding rapidly. Up until recently we have tended to regard languages as bounded entities, and multilingualism has been understood as knowing more than one language. Working with the concept of heteroglossia, researchers are developing alternative perspectives that treat languages as sets of resources for expressing meaning that can be drawn on by speakers in communicatively productive ways in different contexts. These perspectives raise fundamental questions about the myriad of ways of knowing and using language(s). This collection brings together the contributions of many of the key researchers in the field. It will provide an authoritative reference point for contemporary interpretations of heteroglossia and valuable accounts of how translanguaging can be explored and exploited in the fields of education and cultural studies. Professor Constant Leung, King s College London, UK.

"From rap and hip hop to taxi cabs, and from classrooms to interactive online learning environments, each of the chapters in this volume written by well-known and up-and-coming scholars provide fascinating accounts drawing on a wide diversity of rich descriptive data collected in heteroglossic contexts around the globe. Creese and Blackledge have brought together a compelling collection that builds upon and expands Bakhtin s construct of heteroglossia. These scholars help to move the field away from the view of languages as separate bounded system by providing detailed examples and expert analyses of the ways bilinguals and multilinguals draw upon their linguistic repertoires for effective and meaningful communication." Wayne E. Wright, University of Texas at San Antonio, USA."

Quantifying Language Dynamics: On the Cutting Edge of Areal and Phylogenetic Linguistics contains specially-selected papers introducing new, quantitative methodologies for understanding language interaction and evolution. It draws upon data from the phonologies, morphologies, numeral systems, constituent orders, case systems, and lexicons of the world's languages, bringing large datasets and sophisticated statistical techniques to bear on fundamental questions such as: how to identify and account for areal distributions, when language contact leads to grammatical simplification, whether patterns of morphological borrowing can be predicted, how to deal with contact within phylogenetic models, and what new techniques are most effective for classification of the world's languages. The book is relevant for students and scholars in general linguistics, typology, and historical and comparative linguistics.

A first in multimodal/multisemiotic discourse studies, this collection of original articles by international scholars focuses primarily on texts from non-English speaking contexts. The illuminating insights enhance our understanding of how language and other semiotic resources construe specific cultural and social concerns.

Leading scholars in the field examine the role played by the English language in contemporary Japanese society. Their various chapters cover the nature, status, and function of English in Japan, focusing on the ways in which globalization is influencing language practices in the country.

Minglang Zhou's highly erudite and well-researched volume on the policies concerning writing reforms for China's minorities since 1949 provides an original and well-reasoned summary of a complex process. It documents how different script reforms meet dramatically different fates according to local preferences, history, cross-border ties, and the vitality of previously-used scripts. It convincingly shows that no single variable is decisive in the success of a script, and that language planners' fixation with technical details is doomed to failure, without careful coordination of extra-code factors. It also documents the little-known Sino-Soviet cooperation in the area of writing reforms. In a style accessible to both undergraduate and graduate students, Zhou's book is of interest to language planners, sinologists, applied linguists, writing theorists, and ethnologists.

As literature written in Latin has almost no female authors, we are dependent on male writers for some understanding of the way women would have spoken. Plautus (3rd to 2nd century BCE) and Terence (2nd century BCE) consistently write particular linguistic features into the lines spoken by their female characters: endearments, soft speech, and incoherent focus on numerous small problems. Dorota M. Dutsch describes the construction of this feminine idiom and asks whether it should be considered as evidence of how Roman women actually spoke.

The Rhetoric of Religious Cults takes as its departure point the notion that 'cults' have a distinctive language and way of recruiting members. First outlining a rhetorical framework, which encompasses contemporary discourse analysis, the persuasive texts of three movements - Scientology, Jehovah's Witnesses and Children of God - are analysed in detail and their discourse compared with other kinds of recruitment literature. Cults' distinctive negative profile in society is not matched by a linguistic typology. Indeed, this negative profile seems to rest on the semantics and application of the term 'cult' itself.

The authors combine a theoretical reassessment of how we understand, study and analyze processes of identification with detailed case studies of the discourses of three-generation families living in split-border communities along the former Iron Curtain, talking about themselves and other social groups, about their way of life and their experiences past and present.

This analysis of the rhetoric of nine successfully persuasive politicians explains how their use of language created credible and consistent stories about themselves and the social world they inhabit. It explores their use of metaphors, their myths, and how language analysis helps us to understand how politicians are able to persuade.

Did the Greeks find it amusing, irritating or threatening when they heard another Greek speaking in a different dialect? This book exploits the evidence of ancient Greek comedy in an attempt to answer some of the questions about language attitude which are important for understanding ancient ideas about language and ethnicity. Conclusions are based on a comparative study of the language of dialect speaking characters and other foreigners in Old Comedy, and on an examination of linguistic attitudes in other genres of Greek literature.

Examining identity in relation to globalization and migration, this book uses narratives and memoirs from contemporary authors who have lived 'in-between' two or more languages. It explores the human desire to find one's 'own place' in new cultural contexts, and looks at the role of language in shaping a sense of belonging in society.

This volume investigates sociolinguistic discourses, identity choices and their representations in postcolonial national and social life, and traces them to the impact of colonial contact. The chapters stitch together current voices and identities emerging within both ex-colonized and ex-colonizer communities as each copes with the social, lingual, cultural, and religious mixes triggered by colonialism. These mixes, reflected in the five thematic parts of the book - 'postcolonial identities', 'nationhood discourses', 'translating the postcolonial', 'living the postcolonial', and 'colonizing the colonizer' - call for deeper investigations of postcolonial communities using emic approaches.

Freedom of speech is a tradition distinctive to American political culture, and this book focuses on the major debates and discourses that shaped this tradition. Today the American Bill of Rights, with its famous First Amendment, is generally taken for granted, but when James Madison proposed a Bill of Rights in 1789, the reaction among his colleagues in the first Congress was hostile. The book examines how Madison was able to prevail in spite of such opposition. It focuses on discourses connected to the Sedition Act of 1798, which represented a serious threat to freedom of speech and the first Amendment. The author sheds fresh light on key Congressional debates on the Bill of Rights and the Sedition Act by developing and applying an approach to fallacy theory that is suitable to the study of political discourse. He further focuses on criticism of the Madison administration in Federalist newspapers during the War of 1812, arguing that Madison's toleration of such criticism was important in shaping a tradition of free expression in the United States. Efforts to suppress free expression during the Wilson administration represented a serious challenge to this tradition, and the author goes on to employ fallacy theory in examining Congressional discourses for and against Wilson's policy of repression.