This book explores the dynamics of the linguistic landscape as a site of conflict, exclusion, and dissent. It focuses on socio-historical, economic, political and ideological issues, such as reflected in mass protest demonstrations, to forge links between landscape, identity, social justice and power.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.

This book examines a ubiquitous, yet under-researched, area of language education, i.e., language teachers' use of curriculum materials. It particularly focuses on EFL teachers' use of prescribed curriculum materials in higher education in Mainland China and presents a qualitative, multi-case study involving four Chinese EFL teachersand eight students (two students from each teacher's class) at one university in Mainland China. Drawing on data from pre-lesson and post-lesson interviews with the teachers, lesson observations, and documents in three consecutive semesters at the target university, the book delineates the processes of materials useinclassroom settings. It also identifies four domains of factors that influenced the enactment of curriculum materials. Most importantly, by adopting Vygotsky's (1978) mediation theory and Remillard's (2005) participatory perspective, the book constructs a "curriculum enactment mediation model" to reveal the complex and mediated relations among teachers, learners, curriculum materials, and context. It also recommends practical implications for materials developers, teacher educators, administrators, and policymakers.

Up until the mid-1980s most pragmatic analysis had been done on spoken language use, considerably less on written use, and very little at all on literary activity. This has now radically changed. 'Pragmatics' could be informally defined as the study of relationships between language and its users. This volume, first published in 1991, seeks to reposition literary activity at the centre of that study. The internationally renowned contributors draw together two main streams. On the one hand, there are concerns which are close to the syntax and semantics of mainstream linguistics, and on the other, there are concerns ranging towards anthropological linguistics, socio- and psycholinguistics. Literary Pragmatics represents an antidote to the fragmenting specialization so characteristic of the humanities in the twentieth century. This book will be of lasting value to students of linguistics, literature and society. Roger D. Sell discusses the reissue of Literary Pragmatics here: http://www.routledge.com/articles/roger_d._sell_discusses_the_reissue_of_literary_pragmatics/

Politics, Lies and Conspiracy Theories: A Cognitive Linguistic Perspective shows how language influences mechanisms of cognition, perception and belief, and by extension its power to manipulate thoughts and beliefs. This exciting and original work is the first to apply cognitive linguistics to the analysis of political lies and conspiracy theories, both of which have flourished in the internet age and which many argue are threatening democracy. It unravels the verbal mechanisms that make these "different truths" so effective and proliferative, dissecting the verbal structures (metaphor, irony, connotative implications etc) of the words of a variety of real-life cases in the form of politicians, conspiracy theorists and influencers. Marcel Danesi goes on to demonstrate how these linguistic structures "switch on" or "switch off" alternative mind worlds. This book is essential reading for students of cognitive linguistics and will enrich the studies of any student or researcher in language and linguistics more broadly, as well as discourse analysis, rhetoric or political science.

Communication Games is a new and radical interpretation of the relationship between culture and communication. It explores the idea that culture and communication studies should be seen predominantly in relation to struggles and conflicts within the social arena. It criticizes the conventional heritage of the social sciences and humanities. Culture and communication are conceived not merely as means of integrating social actors, but as semiotic ways of providing fitness indicators that allow for the resolution of competition between individuals. From the perspective of Peircean semiotics and the Darwinian understanding of life processes, Communication Games redefines culture in terms of Darwin's notion of sexual selection. Moving on from the realization that sexual selection creates individual organisms with conflicting interests, Communication Games emphasizes the contribution of game theory to semiotics and communication studies. The book demonstrates how cooperation and shared conventions eventually emerge, and how conflicts are resolved through the display of costly and inflated signs. It is from these inflated signs and the escalation of excessive messages that cultures gain a certain degree of stability. Communication Games proposes a new way of understanding culture, communication, and semiotic exchange in terms of game theory.

Linguistic Landscapes is the first comprehensive approach to a largely under-explored sociolinguistic phenomenon: language on signs. Based on an up-to-date review of previous research from various places around the world, the book develops an analytical framework for the systematic analysis of linguistic landscape data. This framework is applied to a sample of 2,444 signs collected in 28 survey areas in central Tokyo. Analytical categories include the languages contained and their combinations, differences between official and nonofficial signs, geographic distribution, availability of translation or transliteration, linguistic idiosyncrasies, and the comparison of older and newer signs, among others. Combining qualitative and quantitative methods, the analysis yields some unique insights about the writers of multilingual signs, their readers, and the languages and scripts in contact. Linguistic Landscapes thus demonstrates that the study of language on signs has much to contribute to research into urban multilingualism, as well as the study of language and society as a whole.

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.

'Pulau Panjan', 'Po Luo Chung', 'Pulau Ujong', 'Lung -ya-men', 'Temasek', 'Singapura' are all former names of Singapore and belie its colourful history as the El-Dorado and nexus of Southeast Asia. Who were Singapore's previous multilingual inhabitants? What were the pidgins, creoles and languages that thronged its market places and created its forgotten identities? How did polyglot migrants caught in the throes of an earlier globalization organize their respective identities? What hybrid identities arose from such cross-cultural interactions? This book presents a fascinating history of early identities in Singapore as examined through the retrospective lens of language. A long view has been chosen for its advantage in providing unexpected socio-political and linguistic insights into the long term effects of change and continuity.

This book presents an empirically-grounded sociolinguistic history of the English language in Hong Kong in the past 170 years. Using substantial sets of diachronic and synchronic data, it traces the changing status and functions of English in relation to spoken Cantonese, Mandarin and written Chinese in the key domains of government, education and business. The author tracks the rise of English-knowing bilingualism in the city's Chinese community and explores the evolutionary dynamics of Hong Kong English. He also speculates on the future of English in the territory, particularly after 2047 when the 'one country, two systems' framework established by the Sino-British Joint Declaration is dismantled. Researchers and students working in the fields of sociolinguistics, English as a global language, world Englishes, applied linguistics and English-language education will find this book provides valuable information and insights about the uses and users of English in colonial and post-colonial Hong Kong. More generally, it makes a unique contribution to the literature on the diffusion and diversification of English worldwide.

The internet has revolutionised the way we live our lives in untold ways, but the most far-reaching is the impact it is having on the way we communicate. Social media sites in particular allow us to maintain friendships beyond geographical barriers, to build up and exploit networked contacts, and to cultivate a public image. And how we communicate online has a profound and lasting impact on language and society. This very timely book brings together a broad selection of the exciting and diverse research that is currently being conducted into language on social media sites including Facebook, Twitter, and TripAdvisor. Studies from leading language researchers, and those at the cutting edge of analysis into social media, explore the impact of social media on how we relate to each other, the communities we live in, and the way we manage and present a sense of self in twenty-first century society.

This collection of case studies from around the world examines how struggles for equality unfold in policies, programs, and practices in educational settings in multilingual contexts. Using sociolinguistic, interactional and discourse analysis, Heller and Martin-Jones examine the complex ways in which dominant ideologies of education, pedagogy, language and identity intersect in a wide variety of educational settings. They focus in particular on how those ideologies are reproduced or challenged, and on the consequences of such processes for changing or maintaining social relations of difference and inequality. Written for policy-makers, educators, and anyone else interested in education and multilingualism, the book places questions of power at the center of thinking about language and education. This collection of case studies from around the world examines how struggles for equality unfold in policies, programs, and practices in educational settings in multilingual contexts. Using sociolinguistic, interactional and discourse analysis, Heller and Martin-Jones examine the complex ways in which dominant ideologies of education, pedagogy, language, and identity intersect in a wide variety of educational settings. They focus in particular on how those ideologies are reproduced or challenged, and on the consequences of such processes for changing or maintaining social relations of difference and inequality. Written for policy-makers, educators, and anyone else interested in education and multilingualism, the book places questions of power at the center of thinking about language and education. It invites us to link questions about minority language maintenance, individual multilingualism, immigrant language education, and the use of former colonial languages in post-colonial settings to the politics and economics of our globalizing age, and to look locally for the spaces for change and action that always present themselves.

Drawing on representative corpora of transcripts from over 100 English criminal jury trials, this stimulating new book explores the nature of 'legal-lay discourse', or the language used by legal professionals before lay juries. Careful analyses of genres such as witness examination and the judge's summing-up reveal a strategic tension between a desire to persuade the jury and the need to conform to legal constraints. The book also suggests ways of managing this tension linguistically to help, not hinder, the jury.

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.

This book brings together Latinx scholars in Rhetoric and Composition to discuss keywords that have been misused or appropriated by forces working against the interests of minority students. For example, in educational and political forums, rhetorics of identity and civil rights have been used to justify ideas and policies that reaffirm the myth of a normative US culture that is white, Eurocentric, and monolinguistically English. Such attempts amount to a project of neo-colonization, if we understand colonization to mean not only the taking of land but also the taking of culture, of which language is a crucial part. The editors introduce the concept of epistemic delinking and argue for its use in conceptualizing a kind of rhetorical and discursive decolonization, and contributors offer examples of this decolonization in action through detailed work on specific terms. Specifically, they draw on their training in rhetoric and on their own experiences as people of color to help reset the field's agenda. They also theorize new keywords to shed light on the great varieties of Latinx writing, rhetoric, and literacies that continue to emerge and circulate in the culture at large, in the hope that the field will feel more urgently the need to recognize, theorize, and teach the intersections of writing, pedagogy, and politics.

This edited book examines cultures of learning from the perspectives of education, applied linguistics and language learning. The concept can be used to explore socio-cultural features of language learning and use contexts in educational institutions, and cultural practices of pedagogic activities and classroom interaction.

First published in 1989, this collection of essays brings into focus the history of a specific form of violence - that of representation. The contributors identify representations of self and other that empower a particular class, gender, nation, or race, constructing a history of the west as the history of changing modes of subjugation. The essays bring together a wide range of literary and historical work to show how writing became an increasingly important mode of domination during the modern period as ruling ideas became a form of violence in their own right. This reissue will be of particular value to literature students with an interest in the concept of violence, and the boundaries and capacity of discourse.

In The Ideology of Conduct, first published in 1987, scholars from various fields, from the medieval period to the present day, discuss literature in which the sole purpose is to instruct women in how to make themselves desirable. This collection investigates how middle-class writers who had long emulated the behaviour of the aristocracy began to criticise that behaviour by formulating an alternative object of desire. They did so without appearing to breed political controversy because it seemed to concern only the female. But writing for and about women in fact became a powerful instrument of hegemony as it introduced a whole new vocabulary for social relations, induced certain forms of economic behaviour as desirable in men and women respectively, and insured the reproduction of the nuclear family. It is argued, therefore, that the literature of conduct not only recorded but also assisted the production of our contemporary gender-based culture.

This groundbreaking book--about differences in communication practices between Mexican-American underclass residents in an East Los Angeles housing project and white, middle-class literacy tutors who worked with them--makes an important contribution to research on the sociolinguistics of the Chicano gang culture. More specifically, this work adds substantially to research on understanding linguistic politeness theories, the use of epistemic modals for negative politeness, and evidentiality. It refines, and in a number of cases, defines, function categories for epistemic modals through a rigorous grammatical analysis. This book is also distinctive in that the author subjects the language of middle-class Anglos to the same type of scrutiny that is often reserved for non-mainstream groups. Youmans contends that the differences between the Chicano and Anglo speakers are the result of the two groups' different sociocultural circumstances, including historical and current living and working patterns and the relative value placed on familialism and communalism versus individualism and independence. (The terms Chicano and Anglo are used as a kind of shorthand in this book--not to raise larger sociocultural issues implied by these terms.) Although the number of participants in the study limits the applicability of the findings as they might be extrapolated to all Chicanos/as, or all Anglos when reporting sociolinguistic observations, the main argument advanced is that language use may provide insights into beliefs, attitudes, and practices in the larger society. This volume is directed to researchers and graduate students in the areas of sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, discourse analysis, and cross-cultural communication, and will also interest language and linguistics educators and grammarians.

From an award-winning writer and linguist, a scientific and personal meditation on the phenomenon of language loss and the possibility of renewal. As a child Julie Sedivy left Czechoslovakia for Canada, and English soon took over her life. By early adulthood she spoke Czech rarely and badly, and when her father died unexpectedly, she lost not only a beloved parent but also her firmest point of connection to her native language. As Sedivy realized, more is at stake here than the loss of language: there is also the loss of identity. Language is an important part of adaptation to a new culture, and immigrants everywhere face pressure to assimilate. Recognizing this tension, Sedivy set out to understand the science of language loss and the potential for renewal. In Memory Speaks, she takes on the psychological and social world of multilingualism, exploring the human brain's capacity to learn-and forget-languages at various stages of life. But while studies of multilingual experience provide resources for the teaching and preservation of languages, Sedivy finds that the challenges facing multilingual people are largely political. Countering the widespread view that linguistic pluralism splinters loyalties and communities, Sedivy argues that the struggle to remain connected to an ancestral language and culture is a site of common ground, as people from all backgrounds can recognize the crucial role of language in forming a sense of self. Distinctive and timely, Memory Speaks combines a rich body of psychological research with a moving story at once personal and universally resonant. As citizens debate the merits of bilingual education, as the world's less dominant languages are driven to extinction, and as many people confront the pain of language loss, this is badly needed wisdom.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.

This volume is the most complete of any published concerning the nine native languages of Quebec: Abenaki, Algonquin, Atikamekw, Cree, Inuktitut, Micmac, Mohawk, Montagnais and Naskapi.

The history of "language teaching" is shot through with methods and approaches to language learning - most recently with "communicative language teaching" - but this book demonstrates that a more differentiated and richer understanding of learning a foreign language is both necessary and desirable. Languages and cultures are interlinked and interdependent and their teaching and learning should be too. Learning another language is part of a complex process of learning and understanding other people's ways of life, ways of thinking and socio-economic experience

The multilingual situation in Cameroon and the status of English as a co-official language constitute a unique and fascinating case for sociolinguistic investigation. Drawing from first-hand material, the author investigates several aspects of this complex configuration, including the historical development of English in Cameroon, the various languages and lingua franca areas, the linguistic policy, the de facto status of English and the situation in the anglophone provinces. The speech community of the Anglophones is highlighted as a rare example of an ethnicity tied to the second language. Apart from important sociolinguistic findings, the work includes a novel, corpus-based analysis of Cameroon English. Certain lexical phenomena are explained by the cognitive coding of culture - particularly the African cultural model of community, which also underlies the self-perception of the Anglophones - a perspective hitherto neglected in the study of the New Englishes.