In her Beijing lectures, Melissa Bowerman presents a lucid introduction and account of her research on a range of topics: how children acquire the semantics of spatial terms, how they construct categories and acquire the semantics of nouns, and how they master the semantics of verbs in early language acquisition. Bowerman also covers the learning of argument structure and expressions of end-state, with special attention to the adult speech that guides children, and hence also the role of typology in acquisition; how cross-linguistic variation affects, for example, how speakers represent 'cutting' and 'breaking' in different languages, and the relation of the Whorfian Hypothesis to cross-linguistic variations in the semantics of languages. Bowerman's over-riding concern throughout is with how children come to master the first language being spoken to them by their parents and caregivers.

Focusing on English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) in the Arab Gulf states, the authors consider both sociolinguistic and pedagogical perspectives, and explore practical implications. This edited volume features chapters covering how teachers are negotiating the linguistic challenges posed by EMI; issues of ownership, choice and agency; the scaffolding of academic literacies; how to support the development of content teachers' pedagogical content knowledge in EMI settings as well as the benefits of a bilingual education. Chapter authors all have extensive local experience that they draw upon reflectively in their writing. Policy-makers, teachers and teacher educators wondering how they can best balance the need to develop competence in English in students of all ages on the Arabian Peninsula in a globalizing world, together with the concern to nurture Arabic language, culture and identity, will gain rich insights from this book. Postgraduates and researchers exploring issues surrounding EMI, both locally and internationally, will benefit from the arguments presented in this volume.

This highly original book brings compelling narratives of migration and social diversity vividly to life. At once a play script and an outcome of ethnographic research, it is a rich resource for the interpretation and representation of life in the multilingual city. The book takes an inside view of a hidden space in the city: an advice and advocacy service in a Chinese community centre. Here, advisors translate and translanguage, making sense of the bureaucratic world for clients who need help to access rights and resources related to housing, employment, education, welfare benefits, insurance, taxation, health and much more.

Language policies impact language choice, language prestige, and language spread. Rising regional integration, both formal and informal, adds to the sensitivity and complexity of language politics, whether in North America, South America or Europe. This book shows how language politics vary across the Americas and contrast with Europe.

Transcultural Flows of English and Education in Asian Contexts examines issues concerning the potential of English learning and teaching to go beyond the classroom and affect the multicultural realities of Asian societies. Asian societies often carry long histories and traditions that influence beliefs about identities,which are changing in our globalizing world. The authors in this volume explore the synthesis that occurs when culture is shared and re-constructed in different contexts. Specifically, the authors show how English is appropriated and refashioned through language and culture exchanges both inside and outside of traditional classrooms in East Asia (i.e., Japan, South Korea, China) and Southeast Asia (e.g.., Indonesia, Thailand). Inside the classroom, transcultural flows have the potential to result in take-up, exchange, appropriation, and refashioning of language and cultural practices that can generate transcultural realities outside the classroom. Understanding transcultural flows may also require understanding circumstances outside of the classroom-for instance, transcultural exchanges that lead to friendships and professional relationships; as companies embrace English and attempt to reach a global audience; as English facilitates access to global interaction in cyberspace; and as membership to nation states, recognition, and identity often confront the politics of English as a global language. For both teachers and students of English, the impact of transcultural connections reaches far beyond the teaching and learning experience. English connects people around the globe-even after students and teachers have finished their lessons or teachers have left the country. To examine the transcultural flows that result from English learning and teaching in Asia, this book addresses the following questions: What becomes of English when it is unmoored from local, national, and regional spaces and imaginatively reconceptualized? What are new forms of global consciousness and cultural competency? How is English rediscovered and reinvented in Asian countries where there are long traditions of cultural beliefs and language practices? How are teachers and students taking up and appropriating English inside and outside classrooms? How has English learning and teaching affected social, political, and business relationships? This book will be of interest to scholars in sociolinguistics, anthropology, and education.

Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) aims to enhance our understanding of how discourse figures in social processes, social structures, and social change. This book is in response to specific changes in mediation technologies of discourse, brought about by the significant concentration of discursive practices within the paradigm of social media communication. This book addresses this participatory media context against a broadly defined tradition in CDS, its aspirations, assumptions, and critique. It views discourse as forms of structured representations across a range of modalities of communication including the emerging meaning-making artefacts and practices across social media. It aspires to provide an overview of the key considerations in doing CDS on social media spaces. The book firstly provides a set of aspiration signposting the parameters of doing social media CDS followed by critical explorations of a number of contemporary case studies of digital discourses around identity, politics and representation. It includes various social media communication including YouTube, Instagram, Wikipedia, and Twitter. The book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of linguistics, politics, sociology, communication studies, media and cultural studies, and science and technology studies. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal Critical Discourse Studies.

This book studies the use of an automated writing evaluation (AWE) systems in research paper revision for publication purposes by Chinese doctoral students. Research writing skills are essential for achieving academic status, and AWE tools can be a great companion on the journey. However, AWE tools may provide a disservice if users do not stay alert to inaccurate feedback, inaccurate correction suggestions and missed errors. The effects of accurate feedback on revision outcomes have been the focus of a number of AWE studies, but student engagement and revision results in cases of inaccurate feedback and missed errors have rarely been investigated. Such investigations can provide practical advice on using automated feedback in research writing. This book provides a comprehensive evaluation of AWE tools and profiles student engagement with tool use in cases of different quality of feedback. It can empower novice scholars and improve the effectiveness of academic writing instructors. The findings can also inform AWE system developers about possible ways of system improvement for research paper writing. The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of language and linguistics studies, education, and those who are interested in academic English writing in general.

An accessible and engaging textbook which has been tailored to the author's own Language, Society and Power module so each edition is refined by student feedback. Virtually all English Langauge and Linguistics degrees around the world have a Language and Society/Sociolinguistics module and most are core courses. This is the ideal textbook for both undergraduate students of linguistics as well as those not studying linguistics full-time but who are interested in the study of language and society. Packed with pedagogical features such as activity boxes, chapter summaries, and further reading. Also accompanied by a companion website with updated features such as a 'who's who' of Twitter, links to blogs, and further discussion questions. This makes it the complete package for students of language and society Includes an 'applied' chapter on projects which has been designed to help students understand what sociolinguists do and how they conduct research, intended to help students conduct their own research in turn.

This book details a study of sign language brokering that is carried out by deaf and hearing people who grow up using sign language at home with deaf parents, known as heritage signers. Child language brokering (CLB) is a form of interpreting carried out informally by children, typically for migrant families. The study of sign language brokering has been largely absent from the emerging body of CLB literature. The book gives an overview of the international, multi-stage, mixed-method study employing an online survey, semi-structured interviews and visual methods, to explore the lived experiences of deaf parents and heritage signers. It will be of interest to practitioners and academics working with signing deaf communities and those who wish to pursue professional practice with deaf communities, as well as academics and students in the fields of Applied Linguistics, Intercultural Communication, Interpreting Studies and the Social Science of Childhood.

The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg sits at the heart of the European Union, yet it forms a very private and close-knit community. The book addresses that apparent paradox, and shows how it is reflected in and sustained by the linguistic practices of the people who live there, both native and foreign. Letzebuergesch, the country's national language, is most closely related to the German dialects of the western Rhineland and the Moselle river valley, but the country's historical and cultural links with Belgium, the Netherlands, and France are much closer than with Germany. Since the demise of Latin in the late Middle Ages as the language of administration, that role has been filled at various times by the standard varieties of French and German. Declared a protected neutral country in 1867, Luxembourg has been twice invaded by Germany in the twentieth century. But since 1945 French and Letzebuergesch have come to predominate and the use of German has once again receded. It is the unwritten social code governing the use of these languages (and latterly also of English) which gives this volume of specially commissioned papers its focus: the purpose is to provide an insider's view of the community, and of its little-known language. The book contains the most detailed linguistic description of Letzebuergesch so far available in English.

This collection brings together a range of perspectives on intercultural communication in multimodal interaction, bridging cognitive, social and functional approaches toward promoting cross-disciplinary dialogues and taking research at the intersections of these fields into new directions. The volume brings together conversationalist, socially-oriented, cognitive, and sensory approaches in considering culture as a dynamic construct, co-constituted and (re)negotiated between participants in interaction, and filtering it through a multimodal lens, drawing on a range of examples, such as educational settings or online video platforms. Each chapter offers a unique perspective on 'culture' and 'intercultural' while also situating their own definitions of these labels against those of the other chapters. Taken together, the chapters form a fluid conversation on the nature of intercultural encounters in today's globalized world, as digital environments intertwine with the physical mobility of people, encouraging researchers across these fields to adopt a more holistic multimodal perspective to approach intercultural interaction. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in intercultural communication, multimodality, sociolinguistics, cognitive and interactional linguistics, and semiotics.

This ground-breaking, provocative book presents an overview of research at the disciplinary intersection of psychoanalysis and linguistics. Understanding that linguistic activity, to a great extent, takes place in unconscious cognition, Thomas Paul Bonfiglio systematically demonstrates how fundamental psychoanalytic mechanisms-such as displacement, condensation, overdetermination, and repetition-have been absent in the history of linguistic inquiry, and explains how these mechanisms can illuminate the understanding of the grammatical structure, evolution, acquisition, and processing of language. Re-examining popular misunderstandings of psychoanalysis along the way, Bonfiglio further proposes a new theoretical configuration of language and expertly sets the future agenda on this subject with new conceptual paradigms for research and teaching. This will be an invaluable, fascinating resource for advanced students and scholars of theoretical and applied linguistics, the cognitive-behavioral sciences, metaphor studies, humor studies and play theory, anthropology, and beyond.

This book is an exploration of the role of language at Warruwi Community, a remote Indigenous settlement in northern Australia. It explores how language use and people's ideas about language are embedded in contemporary Indigenous life there. Using an ethnographic approach, the book examines what language at Warruwi means in the context of the history of the community, ongoing social and political changes and the continuing importance of ancestral traditions. Children growing up at Warruwi still learn to speak many small Indigenous languages. This is remarkable not just in the Australian context, where many Indigenous languages are no longer spoken, but around the world as this kind of multilingualism in small languages persists only in a few remaining pockets. The way that people use many languages in their daily life at Warruwi reveals how high levels of linguistic diversity can be maintained in a small community. This detailed study of the creation of linguistic diversity is relevant to sociolinguistics, linguistic typology, historical linguistics and evolutionary linguistics. More generally, this book is for linguists, anthropologists and anyone with an interest in contemporary Australian Indigenous lives.

This book is an exploration of the role of language at Warruwi Community, a remote Indigenous settlement in northern Australia. It explores how language use and people's ideas about language are embedded in contemporary Indigenous life there. Using an ethnographic approach, the book examines what language at Warruwi means in the context of the history of the community, ongoing social and political changes and the continuing importance of ancestral traditions. Children growing up at Warruwi still learn to speak many small Indigenous languages. This is remarkable not just in the Australian context, where many Indigenous languages are no longer spoken, but around the world as this kind of multilingualism in small languages persists only in a few remaining pockets. The way that people use many languages in their daily life at Warruwi reveals how high levels of linguistic diversity can be maintained in a small community. This detailed study of the creation of linguistic diversity is relevant to sociolinguistics, linguistic typology, historical linguistics and evolutionary linguistics. More generally, this book is for linguists, anthropologists and anyone with an interest in contemporary Australian Indigenous lives.

Language, Literacy and Diversity brings together researchers who are leading the innovative and important re-theorization of language and literacy in relation to social mobility, multilingualism and globalization. The volume examines local and global flows of people, language and literacy in relation to social practice; the role (and nature) of boundary maintenance or disruption in global, transnational and translocal contexts; and the lived experiences of individuals on the front lines of global, transnational and translocal processes. The contributors pay attention to the dynamics of multilingualism in located settings and the social and personal management of multilingualism in socially stratified and ethnically plural social settings. Together, they offer ground-breaking research on language practices and documentary practices as regards to access, selection, social mobility and gate-keeping processes in a range of settings across several continents: Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe.

In the sociopolitics of language, sometimes yesterday's solution is tomorrow's problem. This volume examines the evolving nature of language acquisition planning through a collection of papers that consider how decisions about language learning and teaching are mediated by a confluence of psychological, ideological, and historical forces. The first two parts of the volume feature empirical studies of formal and informal education across the lifespan and around the globe. Case studies map the agents, resources, and attitudes needed for creating moments and spaces for language learning that may, at times, collide with wider beliefs and policies that privilege some languages over others. The third part of the volume is devoted to conceptual contributions that take up theoretical issues related to epistemological and conceptual challenges for language acquisition planning. These contributions reflect on the full spectrum of social and cognitive factors that intersect with the planning of language teaching and learning including ethnic and racial power relations, historically situated political systems, language ideologies, community language socialization, relationships among stakeholders in communities and schools, interpersonal interaction, and intrapersonal development. In all, the volume demonstrates the multifaceted and socially situated nature of language acquisition planning.

This innovative edited collection presents new insights into emerging debates around digital communication practices. It brings together research by leading international experts to examine methods and approaches, multimodality, face and identity, across five thematically organised sections. Its contributors revise current paradigms in view of past, present, and future research and analyse how users deploy the wealth of multimodal resources afforded by digital technologies to undertake tasks and to enact identity. In its concluding section it identifies the ideologies that underpin the construction of digital texts in the social world. This important contribution to digital discourse studies will have interdisciplinary appeal across the fields of linguistics, socio-linguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, gender studies, multimodality, media and communication studies.

The work is intended as an aid for those who aspire to create multilingual LSP collocational dictionaries. Apart from an extensive theoretical background and formal advice for lexicographers, it encompasses a model dictionary, i.e. a Polish, English and Italian collocational dictionary of banking law. The dictionary is designed as a resource for translators, LSP learners and teachers, lawyers and bank employees who use in their professional communication at least two of the above-mentioned languages.

This book reports on an empirical study of oral feedback practices in doctoral supervision meetings, observing supervisors' and students' conduct to enable a new understanding of the social organisation of doctoral research supervision. In a field that has predominantly drawn on surveys and interviews, this study presents a rare, direct insight into doctoral supervision meetings, showing us what actually happens and making a significant contribution to future practice. Based on 25 video-recorded supervision meetings at an Australian university, the book invites the reader into the micro-world of interactions between doctoral students and their supervisors. Drawing on conversation analysis as an analytical framework, the study uncovers how feedback is initiated and delivered, how supervisors manage when students disagree with their advice and guidance, how they acknowledge student autonomy and identity as people with knowledge and expertise in their own right, as well as how supervisors co-work within a team supervision environment. Offering an important new perspective to the study and practice of doctoral supervision, this book will be of interest to doctoral supervisors, postgraduate students and researchers working with conversation analysis and education, and those with an interest in feedback and advice as an integral part of their professions.

This volume is comprehensively designed to help prospective English Language Teaching (EFL) teachers specializing in EFL mainly in South Asian countries. It analyses the application of ELT theories, concepts, and methods to sharpen their understanding of the various techniques used for teaching English effectively in the EFL context. The book discusses the basic concepts of language aimed to develop a sense of the language phenomenon as a unique human attribute. It covers the theories of language from various disciplines such as biology, sociology, psychology, and linguistics. The book explains the underlying structures or components that shape the edifice of languages such as phonology, morphology, syntax, grammar, phonetics, semantics, and pragmatics. While taking the reader through language learning theories with a focus on English as the second language, it discusses the different teaching methods that can be adopted by teachers in classroom settings. The book will be of interest to teachers, students and researchers of education, teacher education, and English Language Teaching. It will also be useful for educators, English language teachers, language learners, professionals working in the field of education and language, and those who aspire to teach and learn English in Foreign context.

This ground-breaking, provocative book presents an overview of research at the disciplinary intersection of psychoanalysis and linguistics. Understanding that linguistic activity, to a great extent, takes place in unconscious cognition, Thomas Paul Bonfiglio systematically demonstrates how fundamental psychoanalytic mechanisms-such as displacement, condensation, overdetermination, and repetition-have been absent in the history of linguistic inquiry, and explains how these mechanisms can illuminate the understanding of the grammatical structure, evolution, acquisition, and processing of language. Re-examining popular misunderstandings of psychoanalysis along the way, Bonfiglio further proposes a new theoretical configuration of language and expertly sets the future agenda on this subject with new conceptual paradigms for research and teaching. This will be an invaluable, fascinating resource for advanced students and scholars of theoretical and applied linguistics, the cognitive-behavioral sciences, metaphor studies, humor studies and play theory, anthropology, and beyond.

This edited collection examines how people use a range of different modalities to negotiate, influence, and/or project their own or other people's identities. It brings together linguistic scholars concerned with issues of identity through a study of language use in various types of written texts, conversation, performance, and interviews.

This book attempts to discuss selected but thorny issues of humor research that form the major stumbling blocks as well as challenges in humor studies at large and thus merit insightful discussion. Any discourse is action, so the text-creation process is always set in a non-verbal context, built of a social and communicative situation, and against the background of relevant culture. On the other hand, humor scholars claim that humorous discourse has its special, essential features that distinguish it from other discourses. The pragmatic solution to the issue of potential circularity of humor defined in terms of discourse and discourse in terms of humor seems only feasible, and thus there is a need to discuss the structure and mechanisms of humorous texts and humorous performances. The chapters in the present volume, contributed by leading scholars in the field of humor studies, address the issues from various theoretical perspectives, from contextual semantics through General Theory of Verbal Humor, cognitive linguistics, discourse studies, sociolinguistics, to Ontological Semantic Theory of Humor, providing an excellent overview of the field to novices and experts alike.

This collection offers a cross-disciplinary exploration of the ways in which multilingual practices were embedded in early modern European literary culture, opening up a dynamic dialogue between contemporary multilingual practices and scholarly work on early modern history and literature. The nine chapters draw on translation studies, literary history, transnational literatures, and contemporary sociolinguistic research to explore how multilingual practices manifested themselves across different social, cultural and institutional spaces. The exploration of a diverse range of contexts allows for the opportunity to engage with questions around how individual practices shape national and transnational language practices and literatures, the impact of multilingual practices on identity formation, and their implications for creative innovations in bilingual and multilingual texts. Taken as a whole, the collection paves the way for future conversations on what early modern literary studies and present-day multilingualism research might learn from one another and the extent to which historical texts might supply precedents for contemporary multilingual practices. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in sociolinguistics, early modern studies in history and literature, and comparative literature.