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.

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 innovative volume is one of the first to represent the usage of bilingual writers in both their languages, offering insight into language corpora as extremely valuable tools in contemporary applied linguistics research, and in turn, into how much of the world's population operate daily. This book discusses one of the first examples of a bilingual writer corpus, the Zayed Arabic-English Bilingual Undergraduate Corpus (ZAEBUC), which includes writing by hundreds of students in two languages, with additional information about the writers and the texts. The result is a rich resource for research in multilingual use and learning of language. The book takes the reader through the design and use of such a corpus and illustrates the potential of this type of corpus with detailed studies that show how assessment, vocabulary, and discourse work across two very different languages. This volume will be of interest to scholars, policymakers, and educators in bilingualism, plurilingualism, language education, corpus design, and natural language processing.

This book explores the role of place names in the formation and maintenance of individual and group identities in multilingual and multi-ethnic situations. Using examples from Austria and Czechia as case studies, the authors examine the power of place names through an interdisciplinary and multi-methods approach that draws from the fields of anthropology, geography, sociolinguistics and toponomastics. The book contextualises both places within their social and political histories, and probes recent debates in the social sciences relating to place names, identity and power. It will be of interest to scholars and students focusing on place names and naming practices, minority communities and languages, and linguistic landscapes.

The use of vague language (for example expressions such as 'bags of time', 'doing stuff', 'sort of thing', 'and all that') is an aspect of communicative competence of considerable social importance. Vague Language Explored examines the function of vague language in context. It spans genre analysis, critical discourse analysis, psycholinguistics and cross-cultural sociolinguistics, in a variety of world cultures. It suggests also applications in TEFL, asking questions such as 'What should learners be taught to understand and use, and why?' and suggesting directions for future research.

The book testifies of the great tolerance of Cognitive Linguists towards internal variety within itself and towards external interaction with major linguistic subdisciplines. Internally, it opens up the broad variety of CL strands and the cognitive unity between convergent linguistic disciplines. Externally, it provides a wide overview of the connections between cognition and social, psychological, pragmatic, and discourse-oriented dimensions of language, which will make this book attractive to scholars from different persuasions. The book is thus expected to raise productive debate inside and outside the CL community. Furthermore, the book examines interdisciplinary connections from the point of view of the internal dynamics of CL research itself. CL is rapidly developing into different compatible frameworks with extensions into levels of linguistics description like discourse, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics among others that have only recently been taken into account in this orientation. The book covers two general topics: (i) the relationship between the embodied nature of language, cultural models, and social action; (ii) the role of metaphor and metonymy in inferential activity and as generators of discourse ties. More specific topics are the nature and scope of constructional meaning, language variation and cultural models; discourse acts; the relationship between communication and cognition, the argumentative role of metaphor in discourse, the role of mental spaces in linguistic processing, and the role of empirical work in CL research. These features endow the book with internal unity and consistency while preserving the identity of each of the contributions therein.

This timely intervention into composition studies presents a case for the need to teach all students a shared system of communication and logic based on the modern globalizing ideals of universality, neutrality, and empiricism. Based on a series of close readings of contemporary writing by Stanley Fish, Asao Inoue, Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle, Richard Rorty, Slavoj Zizek, and Steven Pinker, this book critiques recent arguments that traditional approaches to teaching writing, grammar, and argumentation foster marginalization, oppression, and the restriction of student agency. Instead, it argues that the best way to educate and empower a diverse global student body is to promote a mode of academic discourse dedicated to the impartial judgment of empirical facts communicated in an open and clear manner. It provides a critical analysis of core topics in composition studies, including the teaching of grammar; notions of objectivity and neutrality; empiricism and pragmatism; identity politics; and postmodernism. Aimed at graduate students and junior instructors in rhetoric and composition, as well as more seasoned scholars and program administrators, this polemical book provides an accessible staging of key debates that all writing instructors must grapple with.

This edited book examines names and naming policies, trends and practices in a variety of multicultural contexts across America, Europe, Africa and Asia. In the first part of the book, the authors take theoretical and practical approaches to the study of names and naming in these settings, exploring legal, societal, political and other factors. In the second part of the book, the authors explore ways in which names mirror and contribute to the construction of identity in areas defined by multiculturalism. The book takes an interdisciplinary approach to onomastics, and it will be of interest to scholars working across a number of fields, including linguistics, sociology, anthropology, politics, geography, history, religion and cultural studies.

Distributed Agency presents an interdisciplinary inroad into the latest thinking about the distributed nature of agency: what it's like, what are its conditions of possibility, and what are its consequences. The book's 25 chapters are written by a wide range of scholars, from anthropology, biology, cognitive science, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, geography, law, economics, and sociology. While each chapter takes up different materials using different methods, they all chart relations between the key elements of agency: intentionality, causality, flexibility and accountability. Each chapter seeks to explain how and why such relations are distributed-not just across individuals, but also across bodies and minds, people and things, spaces and times. To do this, the authors work through empirical studies of particular cases, while also offering reviews and syntheses of key ideas from the authors' respective research traditions. Our goals with this collection of essays are to assemble insights from new research on the anatomy of human agency, to address divergent framings of the issues from different disciplines, and to suggest directions for new debates and lines of research. We hope that it will be a resource for researchers working on allied topics, and for students learning about the elements of human-specific modes of shared action, from causality, intentionality, and personhood to ethics, punishment, and accountability.

This book addresses the changing contemporary language worlds in three major contexts. It first discusses how the language landscape maps of cities are changing as a result of increased migration, globalization and global media. These features are evident in place names and place name changes as well as the densities and frequencies of language spoken and used in texts. The second section discusses how the state itself is responding to both indigenous and heritage groups desiring to be included and represented in the state's political landscapes and also expressions of art and culture. In the third section, the authors address a number of cutting-edge theses that are emerging in the linguistic geography and political words. These include the importance of gender, anthropogenetic discourse, the preservation of endangered languages and challenges to a state's official language policy. Through including authors from nine different countries, who are writing about issues in twelve countries and their overlapping interests in language mapping, language usage and policy and visual representations, this book provides inspiring research into future topics at local, national, regional and international scales.

First published in 1992, Vocabularies of Public Life explores the revolution that has taken place in our understanding of contemporary culture and decodes a number of the symbols which now dominate public life. Wuthnow divides the essays collected here into three distinct 'vocabularies.' Part I examines the ways in which religious and scientific languages function as vocabularies of conviction in public life, Part II focuses on music and art as vocabularies of expression, and Part III considers law, ideology, and public policy as vocabularies of persuasion. The contributors discuss such diverse subjects as American spiritualism, the syntax of modern dance and the social contexts of number one songs. What unifies the book is the common concern with the concrete, everyday manifestations of culture and the importance of understanding its basic structure. This book will be of interest to specialists and scholars of various disciplines such as linguistics, literature, media studies, popular culture, and sociology.

*Offers a unique approach to the study of language and identity, addressing the impact of new and emergent areas such as English Medium Instruction on concepts of identity. *Written by one of the leading researchers in the area and it offers his new definition of identity. *The only book to provide an updated understanding of identity within the 21st century multilingual world and meets the growing need of researchers, teachers and students to be able to analyse identity within a modern setting.

This edited book offers a broad selection of interdisciplinary studies within cognitive science. The book illustrates and documents how cognitive science offers a unifying framework for the interaction of fields of study focusing on the human mind from linguistics and philosophy to psychology and the history of science. A selection of renowned contributors provides authoritative historical, theoretical and empirical perspectives on more than six decades of research with a special focus on the progress of cognitive science in Central Europe. Readers encounter a bird's eye view of geographical and linguistic diversity brought about by the cognitive revolution, as it is reflected in the writings of leading authors, many of whom are former students and collaborators of Csaba Pleh, a key figure of the cognitive turn in Central Europe, to whom this book is dedicated. The book appeals to students and researchers looking for the ways various approaches to the mind and the brain intersect.

The world's linguistic map has changed in recent years due to the vast disappearance of indigenous languages. Many factors affect the alteration of languages in various areas of the world including governmental policies, education, and colonization. As indigenous languages continue to be affected by modern influences, there is a need for research on the current state of native linguistics that remain across the globe. Indigenous Language Acquisition, Maintenance, and Loss and Current Language Policies is a collection of innovative research on the diverse policies, influences, and frameworks of indigenous languages in various regions of the world. It discusses the maintenance, attrition, or loss of the indigenous languages; language status in the society; language policies; and the grammatical characteristics of the indigenous language that people maintained and spoke. This book is ideally designed for anthropologists, language professionals, linguists, cultural researchers, geographers, educators, government officials, policymakers, academicians, and students.

"Identity Trouble" brings together contributions from a wide variety of discourse fields to discuss the rising pressures on traditional understandings of identity. The focus is on failures and uncertainties in people's construction of their identities when faced with social, cultural, organizational or other changes and fluidities. The contributions raise a number of critical questions about the concept of identity and how it may be refigured, and draw on a wide range of empirical studies of identity problems in personal and social life.

Adopting a post-structuralist approach in analyzing the Euromosaic data about European minority language groups, Glyn Williams argues that different states construct minority language groups and speakers in different ways. This leads to an argument about the nature of democracy and how the current changes in governmental discourses accommodate linguistic and cultural diversity.

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.

A collection of studies offering an up-to-date analysis of official policies to promote Catalan in a democratic framework in each of the main Spanish regions where it is spoken: Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands.

Ruth Page offers a critical new approach to analyzing the relationships between gender and narrative. She proposes an integrative framework for feminist narratology that draws on literary and linguistic perspectives, illustrated through a range of original studies that interrogate literary texts from different historical periods and expressive traditions, along with a range of non-literary narratives. This approach gives new direction to this important field of narrative analysis, challenging its earlier assumptions in the light of post-modern gender theory.

An increasingly important field of research within multilingualism and sociolinguistics, Family Language Policy (FLP) investigates the explicit and overt planning of language use within the home and among family members. However the diverse range of different family units and contexts around the globe necessitates a similarly diverse range of research perspectives which are not yet represented within the field. Tackling this problem head on, this volume expands the scope of families in FLP research. Bringing together contributors and case studies from every continent, this essential reference broadens lines of inquiry by investigating language practices and ideologies in previously under-researched families. Seeking to better reflect contemporary influences on FLP processes, chapters use innovative methodologies, including digital ethnographies and autoethnography, to explore diverse family configurations (adoptive, LGBTQ+, and single parent), modalities (digital communication and signed languages), and speakers and contexts (adult learners, Indigenous contexts, and new speakers). Bringing to light the dynamic, fluid nature of family and kinship as well as the important role that multilingualism plays in family members' negotiation of power, agency, and identity construction, Diversifying Family Language Policy is a state-of-the-art reference to contemporary theoretical, methodological and ethical advances in the field of family language policy.

The Contributions to the Sociology of Language series features publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It addresses 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 scholars interested in language in society from a broad range of disciplines - anthropology, education, history, linguistics, political science, and sociology. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Natalie Fecher.

This book investigates the importance of humour and play in the establishment of individual and group identities among adult language learners on an intensive business English course. The enclosed setting allows the emergent nature of community building and identity projection to be traced, foregrounding the important role of humorous play in these vital social processes. The book will be of interest to students and researchers of applied linguistics, second language acquisition and humour studies.