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.

The volume offers an up-to-date overview of the influence of English on Italian, bringing together the linguistic and the cultural dimensions. The history of language contact between Italy and Anglo-American societies is the basis for understanding lexical borrowing and for identifying the domains of vocabulary more intensely affected in time. Drawing on previous research and on existing lexicographic evidence, this book presents a typology of borrowings based on a new, usage-based word list of Italian Anglicisms which is part of a larger multilingual project (GLAD - Global Anglicism Database). The topics covered are the number of Anglicisms in Italian, their frequency in specialist fields and registers, the blurred area between borrowing and the circulation of international vocabulary, luxury loans and casuals. The book rounds up with the cultural debate on English-only education, which has recently stirred purist concerns, marking an attitudinal shift of Italian from an 'open' to a 'protectionist' language towards exogenous influences. This book is addressed primarily to scholars and university students, but also to a lay audience of non-experts, interested in the linguistic and cultural contacts between English and Italian.

In Presented Discourse in Popular Science, Olga A. Pilkington explores the forms and functions of the voices of scientists in books written for non-professionals. This study confirms the importance of considering presentation of discourse outside of literary fiction: popular science uses presented discourse in ways uncommon for fiction yet not conventional for non-fiction either. This analysis is an acknowledgement of the social consequences of popularization. Discourse presentation of scientists reconstructs the world of the scientific community as a human space but also projects back into it an image of the scientist the public wants to see. At the same time, Pilkington's findings strengthen the view of popularization that rejects the notion of a strict divide between professional and popular science.

Winner of the 2021 New Voices Book Award by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology Exploring the ways in which the development of linguistic practices helped expand national politics in remote, rural areas of Venezuela, Language and Revolutionary Magic in the Orinoco Delta situates language as a mediating force in the creation of the 'magical state'. Focusing on the Waraos speakers of the Orinoco Delta, this book explores center–periphery dynamics in Venezuela through an innovative linguistic anthropological lens. Using a semiotic framework informed by concepts of 'transduction' and 'translation', this book combines ethnographic and historical evidence to analyze the ideological mediation and linguistic practices involved in managing a multi-ethnic citizenry in Venezuela. Juan Luis Rodriguez shows how indigenous populations participate in the formation and contestation of state power through daily practices and the use of different speech genres, emphasising the performative and semiotic work required to produce revolutionary subjects. Establishing the centrality of language and semiosis in the constitution of authority and political power, this book moves away from seeing revolution in solely economic or ideological terms. Through the collision between Warao and Spanish, it highlights how language ideologies can exclude or integrate indigenous populations in the public sphere and how they were transformed by Hugo Chavez' revolutionary government to promote loyalty to the regime.

What role does language play in the formation and perpetuation of our ideas about nationality and other social categories? And what role does it play in the formation and perpetuation of nations themselves, and of other human groups? Language and Nationality considers these questions and examines the consequences of the notion that a language and a nationality are intrinsically connected. Pietro Bortone illustrates how our use of language reveals more about us than we think, is constantly judged, and marks group insiders and group outsiders. Casting doubt on several assumptions common among academics and non-academics alike, he highlights how languages significantly differ among themselves in structure, vocabulary, and social use, in ways that are often untranslatable and can imply a particular culture. Nevertheless, he argues, this does not warrant the way language has been used for promoting a national outlook and for teaching us to identify with a nation. Above all, the common belief that languages indicate nationalities reflects our intellectual and political history, and has had a tremendous social cost. Bortone elucidates how the development of standardized national languages - while having merits - has fostered an unrealistic image of nations and has created new social inequalities. He also shows how it has obscured the history of many languages, artificially altered their fundamental features, and distorted the public understanding of what a language is.

Spelling and Writing Words: Theoretical and Methodological Advances provides a set of contributions about how individuals write words. Understanding word production is of major importance as it allows understanding how words -the basic elements of written language- are stored in the writers' brain and how do writers select the spelling of a word. < The theoretical chapters address hot topics in the field such as the role of phonology in writing, bilingualism, language disorders, orthographic acquisition, and the influence of handwriting on reading. The methodological chapters address individual differences, how to measure handwriting performance in different handwriting styles, and neuroscientific approaches. The concluding chapters explore the future of written word production research.

In Dynamics of Teaching and Learning Modern Hebrew as an Additional Language Yona Gilead presents original research into classroom interactional practices by offering a thick description of a successful beginner-level Modern Hebrew program at an Australian university. The book charts and theorizes the cohort's teacher and students' trajectory of using Hebrew as the main means of instructing and acquiring the language, and highlights seven key features which contribute to students' learning. The book's research-based findings and analysis of classroom dynamics contribute to theorizing the currently largely praxis-based discipline of L2 Modern Hebrew instruction, hence providing a stronger theoretical understanding of how and why students can be assisted in their language learning. This original research provides a template for renewed L2 Hebrew research.

How do you react to an intercultural situation that you do not understand? There are four options. You wait until it's over. You adjust your behavior and "do as the natives do." You blame the other as strange and stupid. Or you start to wonder by thinking about yourself and the other(s). This last option is called a Rich Point. This book provides an overview of research into 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 the interaction approach, contrastive approach and cultural representational approach. Volume 2 offers nine additional chapters exemplifying the 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.

This book provides curriculum planners, materials developers, and language educators with curricular perspectives and classroom activities in order to address the needs of learners of English as a global lingua franca in an increasingly globalized and interdependent world. The authors argue that language educators would benefit from synthesizing and using research and evidence-based cooperative learning methods and structures to address the current world-readiness standards for learning languages in the five domains of Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, and Communities. The book outlines the main cooperative learning principles of heterogenous grouping, positive interdependence, individual accountability, social/collaborative skills, and group processing, then demonstrates their relevance to language teaching and learning. This book will be of interest to students in pre-service teacher education programmes as well as in-service practitioners, teacher trainers and educational administrators.

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.

Why do people take offence at things that are said? What is it exactly about an offending utterance which causes this negative reaction? How well motivated is the response to the offence? Offensive Language addresses these questions by applying an array of concepts from linguistic pragmatics and sociolinguistics to a wide range of examples, from TV to Twitter and from Mel Gibson to Donald Trump. Establishing a sharp distinction between potential offence and actual offence, Jim O'Driscoll then examines a series of case studies where offence has been caused, assessing the nature and degree of both the offence and the documented response to it. Through close linguistic analysis, this book explores the fine line between free speech and criminal activity, searching for a principled way to distinguish the merely embarrassing from the reprehensible and the censurable. In this way, a new approach to offensive language emerges, involving both how we study it and how it might be handled in public life.

What is suicide? When does suicide start and when does it end? Who is involved? Examining narratives of suicide through a discourse analytic framework, Discursive Constructions of the Suicidal Process demonstrates how linguistic theories and methodologies can help answer these questions and cast light upon what suicide involves and means, both for those who commit an act and their loved ones. Engaging in close analysis of suicide letters written before the act and post-hoc narratives from after the event, this book is the first qualitative study to view suicide not as a single event outside time, but as a time-extended process. Exploring how suicide is experienced and narrated from two temporal perspectives, Dariusz Galasinski and Justyna Ziolkowska introduce discourse analysis to the field of suicidology. Arguing that studying suicide narratives and the reality they represent can add significantly to our understanding of the process, and in particular its experiences and meanings, Discursive Constructions of the Suicidal Process demonstrates the value of discourse analytic insights in informing, enriching and contextualising our knowledge of suicide.

Eliezer and Miriam Ben-Rafael investigate world-cities' linguistic landscapes about the intermingling influences of globalization, the national principle and multiculturalism through conjunctions of their respective codes - lingua francas, national languages and ethnic vernaculars. These analyses lead to the elaboration of a paradigm of multiple globalizations.

The main purpose of the book is to explore whether native speakerism has an influence on Polish language schools, using the explanatory mixed-methods design. The findings show that the ideology is present in Poland, but it is manifested in complex and subtle ways. Most prominent findings indicate a wage gap between teachers considered native speakers and their Polish counterparts, and the discrepancy between the levels of education required of the two groups, with native speakers often being employed without necessary qualifications. Finally, the findings suggest that Polish teacher education programmes should expose budding teachers to relevant literature regarding native speakerism and other issues related to native and non-native speaker status so that they can critically examine them.

Cognitive Sociolinguistics combines the interest in meaning of Cognitive Linguistics with the interest in social variation of sociolinguistics, converging on two domains of enquiry: variation of meaning, and the meaning of variation. These Ten Lectures, a transcribed version of talks given by professor Geeraerts in 2009 at Beihang University in Beijing, introduce and illustrate both dimensions. The 'variation of meaning' perspective involves looking at types of semantic and categorial variation, at the role of social and cultural factors in semantic variation and change, and at the interplay of stereotypes, prototypes and norms. The 'meaning of variation' perspective involves looking at the way in which categorization processes of the type studied by Cognitive Linguistics shape how scholars and laymen think about language variation.

Language acquisition has been the subject of decades of research. Most of the previous research on second language acquisition has centered around adult learners, leaving child learners understudied by comparison. This book focuses on child second language development. The cross-sectional empirical study herein investigates the syntax-semantics interface in English speaking children acquiring German and French as second languages. The author discusses variables such as crosslinguistic influence, the complexity of the learning tasks, cognitive maturity and the learning context. By focusing on child second language acquisition in immersion education, this book not only substantially contributes to the field of second language acquisition but also offers important insights into teaching in an immersion context.

This work offers a new perspective on the work of Confucius, the great reference of classical Chinese thought. In general, relatively little work has been done on Confucius' linguistic concerns, which nevertheless did have an impact in his time and afterwards. The author starts from a sociolinguistic approach, based mainly on the ethnography of communication, to analyze the role played by language in Confucius' texts and its links with the ethical program proposed therein. It is, therefore, a considerably novel perspective which, moreover, allows us to cover a very relevant number of interests. The pages of this work concern sociolinguists, but also historians of linguistics, philosophers, and cultural scientists in general. In short, it provides a different vision of one of the great cultural references of humanity.

Pragmatic Issues in Specialized Communicative Contexts, edited by Francesca Bianchi and Sara Gesuato, illustrates how interactants systematically and effectively employ micro and macro linguistic resources and textual strategies to engage in communicative practices in such specific contexts as healthcare services, TV interpreting, film dialogue, TED talks, archaeology academic communication, student-teacher communication, and multilingual classrooms. Each contribution presents a pedagogical slant, reporting on or suggesting didactic approaches to, or applications of, pragmatic aspects of communication in SL, FL and LSP learning contexts. The topics covered and the issues addressed are all directly relevant to applied pragmatics, that is, pragmatically oriented linguistic analysis that accounts for interpersonal-transactional issues in real-life situated communication.

This book includes twelve articles that present new research on the Finnic and Baltic languages spoken in the southern and eastern part of the Circum-Baltic area. It aims to elaborate on the various contact situations and (dis)similarities between the languages of the area. Taking an areal, comparative, or sociolinguistic perspective, the articles offer new insights into the grammatical, semantic, pragmatic, and textual patterns of different types of predicates or nouns or consider the variation of grammatical categories from a typological perspective. The qualitative analyses find support in quantitative data collected from language corpora or written sources, including those representing the less studied varieties of the area.

This volume focuses on today's kibbutz and the metamorphosis which it has undergone. Starting with theoretical considerations and clarifications, it discusses the far-reaching changes recently experienced by this setting. It investigates how those changes re-shaped it from a setting widely viewed as synonymous to utopia, but which has gone in recent years through a genuine transformation. This work questions the stability of that "renewing kibbutz". It consists of a collective effort of a group of specialized researchers who met for a one-year seminar prolonged by research and writing work. These scholars benefitted from resource field-people who shared with them their knowledge in major aspects of the kibbutz' transformation. This volume throws a new light on developmental communalism and the transformation of gemeinschaft-like communities to more gesellschaft-like associations. Contributors are: Havatselet Ariel, Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Miriam Ben-Rafael, Sigal Ben-Rafael Galanti, Yechezkel Dar, Orit Degani Dinisman, Yuval Dror, Sylvie Fogiel-Bijaoui, Alon Gal, Rinat Galily, Shlomo Gans, Sybil Heilbrunn, Michal Hisherik, Meirav Niv, Michal Palgi, Alon Pauker, Abigail Paz-Yeshayahu, Yona Prital, Moshe Schwartz, Orna Shemer, Michael Sofer, Menahem Topel, and Ury Weber.

This volume highlights the dynamic nature of the field of English Linguistics and features selected contributions from the 8th Biennial International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English. The contributions comprise studies (i) that focus on the structure of linguistic systems (or subsystems) or the internal structure of specific construction types, (ii) that take an interest in variation at all linguistic levels, or (iii) that explore what linguistic findings can tell us about human cognition in general, and language processing in particular. All chapters represent state-of-the-art research that relies on rigorous quantitative and qualitative analysis and that will inform current and future linguistic practice and theory building.

This work offers a novel and interdisciplinary approach to Translation Studies by connecting this discipline with the oral history on communism. Following the collapse of the communist regime in the Eastern bloc (1989-1991), oral history interviews became the research method par excellence, providing an alternative version to the distorted public discourse. This book addresses the challenges posed by the translation of transcribed historical interviews on communism. The author's translation from Romanian into English of an original corpus helps formulate a methodological framework nonexistent, up to this point, within Translation Studies. Additionally, drawing on research in conversation analysis and psychology, the so-called fictive orality of the data is defined according to an innovative tripartite paradigm: vividness, immediacy, and fragmentation. Inscribed in the current call for translators' activism and visibility, the work draws on oral history terminology to reflect on the translational experience as a 'dialogic exchange' whereby listening assumes central importance. The descriptive and prescriptive paradigms work in concert, facilitating the understanding of translation strategies and of the mechanisms animating historical interviews. However, beyond these theoretical insights, what gains prominence is the argument of the affectivity steeped in the interviews, which alerts translators to the emotive cadence of oral history. Translation is understood here not only as a linguistic and cognitive exercise but rather as a subjective and necessary undertaking in which translators become co-creators of history, illuminating the way knowledge about the past has been and continues to be formed and mediated.