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 volume considers the ways in which modernity challenges and informs the language policies of various Southeast Asians nations. Using case studies from Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, the authors examine language policies that are explicitly articulated either in the form of State constitutions or in the public proclamations of political leaders. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which English often seems as the language of globalization, impacts the status of indigenous Southeast Asian language.

Spanish in New York is a groundbreaking sociolinguistic analysis of immigrant bilingualism in a U.S. setting. Drawing on one of the largest corpora of spoken Spanish ever assembled for a single city, Otheguy and Zentella demonstrate the extent to which the language of Latinos in New York City represents a continuation of structural variation as it is found in Latin America, as well as the extent to which Spanish has evolved in New York City. Their study, which focuses on language contact, dialectal leveling, and structural continuity, carefully distinguishes between the influence of English and the mutual influences of forms of Spanish with roots in different parts of Latin America.
Taking variationist sociolinguistics as its guiding paradigm, the book compares the Spanish of New Yorkers born in Latin America with that of those born in New York City. Findings are grounded in a comparative analysis of 140 sociolinguistic interviews of speakers with origins in Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico and Puerto Rico. Quantitative analysis (correlations, anovas, variable hierarchies, constraint hierarchies) reveals the effect on the use of subject personal pronouns of the speaker's gender, immigrant generation, years spent in New York, and amount of exposure to English and to varieties of Spanish. In addition to these speaker factors, structural and communicative variables, including the person and tense of the verb and its referential status, have a significant impact on pronominal usage in New York City.

This book revolves around educating recently arrived immigrant youth in the US who are emergent bilinguals. Drawing on a seven-year research collaboration with three ESL teachers in an urban secondary school in the US, it addresses questions around taking a critical approach to language and literacy education and what this looks like in everyday practice, as well as how recently arrived youth and emergent bilinguals participate in critical language and literacy education, and what can be learned and developed as a result. The chapters illustrate the praxis of critical language and literacy education undertaken by everyday ESL teachers; curricular materials and pedagogical practices that promote youths' engagement with, and analysis of, words and worlds; and finally, a methodological and relational approach to researching with classroom teachers. The book introduces teaching practices such as dialogic problem-posing, translanguaging and translation, the use of multimodal texts, and youth research on language. Arguing for the potential power of critical language and literacy education for immigrant youth and their teachers, this book will benefit educators, researchers, and graduate students in the fields of language and literacy, second language acquisition (SLA), ESL and TESOL pedagogy, and in curriculum studies, education of immigrant children and youth, and multicultural issues in education.

Do the languages people speak influence their economic decisions and social behavior in multilingual societies? This Handbook brings together scholars from various disciplines to examine the links and tensions between economics and language to find the delicate balance between monetary benefits and psychological costs of linguistic dynamics.

This volume studies the ways in which modernity has been conceived, practiced, and performed in Indian literatures from the 18th to 20th century. It brings together essays on writings in Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Odia, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, and languages from Northeast India, which form a dialogical relationship with each other in this volume. The concurrence and contradictions emerging through these studies problematize the idea of modernity afresh. The book challenges the dominance of colonial modernity through socio-historical and cultural analysis of how modernity surfaces as a multifaceted phenomenon when contextualized in the multilingual ethos of India. It further tracks the complex ways in which modernism in India is tied to the harvests of modernity. It argues for the need to shift focus on the specific conditions that gave shape to multiple modernities within literatures produced from India. A versatile collection, the book incorporates engagements with not just long prose fiction but also lesser-known essays, research works, and short stories published in popular magazines. This unique work will be of interest to students and teachers of Indian writing in English, Indian literatures, and comparative literatures. It will be indispensable to scholars of South Asian studies, literary historians, linguists, and scholars of cultural studies across the globe.

This book is an innovative sociolinguistic study of New Australia, an Australian immigrant community in Paraguay in 1893, whose descendants today speak Guarani. Providing fresh data on a previously under-researched community who are an extremely rare case of language shifting from English heritage language to a local indigenous language, the case study is situated within the wider context of the colonial and post-colonial spread of English in Latin America over the past century. Drawing on insights from linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, Latin American studies and history, the author presents the history of the colony before closely analysing the interplay of language and identity in this uniquely diasporic setting. This book fills a longstanding gap in the World Englishes and heritage languages literature, and it will be of interest to scholars of colonial and postcolonial languages, and minority language more generally.

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 book presents a collection of academic essays that take a fresh look at content and body transformation in the new media, highlighting how old hierarchies and canons of analysis must be revised. The movement of narratives and characterisations across forms, conventionally understood as adaptation, has commonly involved high-status classical forms (drama, epic, novel) being transformed into recorded and broadcast media (film, radio and television), or from the older recorded media to the newer ones. The advent of convergent digital platforms has further transformed hierarchies, and the formation of global conglomerates has created the commercial conditions for ever more lucrative exchanges between different media. Now source texts can move in any direction and take up any configuration, as emerging interacting fan bases drive innovation and new creative and commercial possibilities are deployed. Moreover, transformation may be not just a technology-driven creative practice and response, but at the very centre of the thematic worlds developed in those forms of story-telling which are currently popular: television series, video games, films and novels. The magic transformation of "your" money into "their" money is paralleled in contemporary media and culture by the centrality of transformation of one product to another as a media industry practice, as well as the transformation of bodies as a major theme both in the ensuing media products and in people's identity practices in daily life.

In the wake of #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, #rhodesmustfall and the Covid-19 pandemic, this groundbreaking book echoes the growing demand for decolonization of the production and dissemination of academic knowledge. Reflecting the dynamic and collaborative nature of online discussion, this conversational book features interviews with globally-renowned scholars working on language and race and the interactive discussion that followed and accompanied these interviews. Participants address issues including decoloniality; the interface of language, development and higher education; race and ethnicity in the justice system; lateral thinking and the intellectual history of linguistics; and race and gender in a biopolitics of knowledge production. Their discussion crosses disciplinary boundaries and is a vital step towards fracturing racialized and gendered epistemic systems and creating a decolonized academia.

This book provides readers with the latest research on the affective aspect of online interactions between doctors and e-patients in the context of China from a poststructuralist discourse analysis perspective. At the heart of this book is the presentation of four chapters which address (1) indirect negative emotional acts by e-patients and empathic acts by doctors (constituting "affective practice"), (2) the interactional discursive features involved in the affective practice, (3) discursive positions of e-patients and doctors within the affective practice context, and (4) power relations that are reflected in the positionings. This book sheds light on the importance of examining the affective facet of medical consultation, when it comes to identifying non-traditional positions and power relations in doctor-patient communication. It also provides the implication that e-healthcare platforms, especially those with an e-commercialized model for healthcare services, have potential to produce a type of neo-liberal discourse-the e-commercialized medical consultation discourse-in which patients and caregivers, who are acknowledged as the less powerful group in the traditional healthcare activities, are empowered and privileged.

This book looks at the historic use of foreign language by the U.S. armed forces. Through research into military documents, many of which are generally inaccessible, the author has investigated the purpose and extent of language capability in the armed services. A necessary skill in the acquisition of intelligence, language skill emerges from this study as being of concern as well for command, control, communications, and for civil military operations. The services' efforts to produce language skills are presented historically, from World War I through Vietnam, from extensive cooperation with academic institutions to short-term services contracted from entrepreneurs.

A unique historical and linguistic resource for those in anthropology, art, folklore, history, linguistics, literature, psychology, religion, sociology, and environmental studies, as well as performers and poets. Not simply relics of the past, proverbs are an oral tradition containing historical and anthropological knowledge missing from conventional sources, and as micro-histories, provide a valuable source for the reconstruction of the manners, characteristics, and worldviews of societies. While only a few hundred Kamba proverbs have ever appeared in print, thousands have circulated over time, from the monsoon exchange era of the Roman Empire through the advent of Islam, European imperialism and colonialism to independence. Today, a resurgence of interest in the form has been generated via social media, songs and vernacular radio programmes. This book provides the first, comprehensive collection of Kamba proverbs from Eastern Kenya in their original Kikamba language and in translation. Analysing 2,000 proverbs drawn from oral interviews, archival collections, museum artefacts and published sources, the author traces the origins of each and explores their meaning, interpretation and use. Covering a diverse range of subjects that ranges from plants, animals, birds and insects, to weather, land, the roles of men and women, cosmology, ritual and belief, healing, trade, politics and peacemaking, the book offers new insights into Kenya's rural world and the expansion of Kamba society, East African history, language and culture of vital significance for the social sciences. A valuable comparative work for societal change elsewhere in Africa and beyond, the book also suggests an innovative, alternative approach to the study of the African past.

Language, Health and Culture brings together contributions by linguistic scholars working in the area of health communication in Asia—in particular, in Hong Kong, Mainland China, Singapore, Japan and Taiwan. Olga Zayts-Spence and Susan M. Bridges, along with the contributors, draw on a diverse range of authentic data from different (primary, secondary, digital) healthcare contexts across Asia. The contributions probe empirical analyses and meta-reflections on the empirical, epistemological and theoretical foundations of doing research on language and health communication in Asia. While many of the medical and technological advances originate from the ‘non-English-dominant’/‘peripheral’ contexts, when it comes to health communication, there is a strong tendency to downplay and marginalize the scope and the impact of the ripe research tradition in these contexts. The contributions to the edited volume problematize the hegemony of dominant (Anglocentric) traditions in health communication research by highlighting culture- and context-specific ways of interpreting different health realities through linguistic lenses.

This book takes a fresh approach to analysing how new languages are created, combining in-depth colonial history and empirical, usage-based linguistics. Focusing on a rarely studied language, the authors employ this dual methodology to reconstruct how multilingual individuals drew on their perception of Romance and West African languages to form French Guianese Creole. In doing so, they facilitate the application of a usage-based approach to language while simultaneously contributing significantly to the debate on creole origins. This innovative volume is sure to appeal to students and scholars of language history, creolisation and languages in contact. Chapter 3 is published open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.

This book examines stereotypical traits of women as they are reflected in Anglo-American anti-proverbs, also known as proverb transformations, deliberate proverb innovations, alterations, parodies, variations, wisecracks, fractured proverbs, and proverb mutations. Through these sayings and witticisms the author delineates the image of women that these anti-proverbs reflect, her qualities, attributes and behavior. The book begins with an analysis of how women's role in the family, their sexuality and traditional occupations are presented in proverbs, and presents an overview of the genre of the anti-proverb. The author then analyses how this image of women is transformed in anti-proverbs, sometimes subverting, but often reinforcing the sexist bias of the original. This engaging work will appeal to students and scholars of humour studies, paremiology, gender studies, cultural studies, folklore and sociolinguistics alike.

The author analyzes, from a historical sociolinguistic point of view, selected domains of morphosyntactic variation in a 250,000 word collection of the Middle English Paston Letters (1421-1503). In three case studies, two nominal and one verbal variable are described and discussed in detail: the replacement of Old English pronouns by borrowed pronouns, the introduction and spread of >wh-relativizers, and the spread and routinization of light verb constructions (take, make, give, have, do plus deverbal noun). While the author aims at a balanced integration of different approaches in sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, typology, and language change, the main focus is on social network theory and the role of the linguistic individual in the formation and change of linguistic structures.

Imagine this book was written in Comic Sans. Would this choice impact your image of me as an author, despite causing no literal change to the content within? Generally, discussions of how language variants influence interpretation of language acts/users have focused on variation in speech. But it is important to remember that specific ways of representing a language are also often perceived as linked to specific social actors. Nowhere is this fact more relevant than in written Japanese, where a complex history has created a situation where authors can represent any sentence element in three distinct scripts. This monograph provides the first investigation into the ways Japanese authors and their readers engage with this potential for script variation as a social language practice, looking at how purely script-based language choices reflect social ideologies, become linked to language users, and influence the total meaning created by language acts. Throughout the text, analysis of data from multiple studies examines how Japanese language users' experiences with the script variation all around them influence how they engage with, produce, and understand both orthographic variation and major social divides, ultimately evidencing that even the avoidance of variation can become a socially significant act in Japan.

This volume examines strategies for embedding gender awareness within translation studies and translator training programmes. Drawing on a rich collection of theoretically-informed case studies, its authors provide practical advice and examples on implementing gender-inclusive approaches and language strategies in the classroom. It focuses on topics including, how to develop gender-inclusive practices to challenge students' attitudes and behaviours; whether there are institutional constraints that prevent trainers from implementing non-heteronormative practices in their teaching; and how gender awareness can become an everyday mode of expression. Positioned at the lively interface of gender and translation studies, this work will be of interest to practitioners and scholars from across the fields of linguistics, education, sociology and cultural studies.

This collection showcases the diversity and disciplinary breadth of small stories research, highlighting the growing critical mass of scholarship on small stories and its reach beyond discourse and sociolinguistic perspectives. The volume both takes stock of and seeks to advance the development of small stories research by Alexandra Georgakopoulou and Michael Bamberg, as a counterpoint to conventional models in narrative studies, one which has accounted for "atypical" yet salient activities in everyday life, such as fragmentation and open-endedness, anchoring onto the present, and co-constructive dimensions in stories and identities. With data from different languages and contexts, emphasis is placed on the analytical aspects of the paradigm toward producing models for the analysis of structures, textual and interactional choices, and genres of small stories. Chapters on the role and commodification of small stories in digital environments reflect on the paradigm’s recent extension to the analysis of social media communication. This book will appeal to scholars interested in narrative inquiry and narrative analysis, in such fields as sociolinguistics, literary studies, communication studies, and biographical studies.

This edited book examines the use of English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) in a variety of international higher education contexts. The internationalization of education - indicated by increasing mobility of students, staff and ideas, as well as by policies and programmes put in place to facilitate educational exchange - has led to increasing adoption of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) for educational purposes. In this book, the authors present the results of empirical research into the implementation, assessment, development and use of EMI programmes in different settings, presenting the case for more structured training of teachers and staff. It will be of interest to second/foreign language teaching and administrative staff, as well as anyone else involved in teaching in English at higher education level.

Ideology is so powerful it makes us believe that war is rational, despite both its brutal means and its devastating ends. The power of ideology comes from its intimate relation to language: ideology recruits all semiotic modalities, but language is its engine-room. Drawing on Halliday's linguistic theory - in particular, his account of the "semiotic big-bang" - this book explains the latent semiotic machinery of language on which ideology depends. The book illustrates the ideological power of language through a study of perhaps the most significant and consequential of our ideologies: those that enable us to legitimate, celebrate, even venerate war, at the same time that we abhor, denounce and proscribe violence. To do so, it makes use of large multi-register corpora (including the British National Corpus), and the reporting of the 2003 invasion of Iraq by Australian, US, European, and Asian news sources. Combining detailed text analysis with corpus linguistic methods, it provides an empirical analysis showing the astonishing reach of our ideologies of war and their profoundly covert and coercive power.

Comprising 11 countries and hundreds of languages from one of the most culturally diverse regions in the world, the chapters in this collection explore a wide range of translation issues. The subject of this volume is set in the contrasted landscapes of mainland peninsulas and maritime archipelagos in Southeast Asia, which, whilst remaining a largely minor area in Asian studies, harbors a wealth of textual heritage that opens to inquiries and new readings. From the post-Angkor Cambodia, the post-colonial Viantiane, to the ultra-modern Singapore metropolis, translation figures problematically in the modernization of indigenous literatures, criss-crossing chronologically and spatially through different literary landscapes. The peninsular geo-body gives rise to the politics of singularity as seen in the case of the predominant monolingual culture in Thailand, whereas the archipelagic geography such as the thousand islands of Indonesia allows for peculiar types of communication. Translation can also be metaphorized poetically to configure the transference in different scenarios such as the cases of self-translation in Philippine protest poetry and untranslatability in Vietnamese diasporic writings. The collection also includes intra-regional comparative views on historical and religious terms. This book will appeal to scholars and postgraduate students of translation studies, sociolinguistics, and Southeast Asian studies.

Based on data from beauty vlogs published by well-known YouTubers, Bhatia explores how they discursively negotiate multiple identities in a creative and participatory space, giving rise to complexities in the definition of categories such as expert, layperson, learner, and teacher in fluid and dynamic digital contexts. In this insightful book, Bhatia sets out to investigate the interdiscursive construction of identity on YouTube. Taking a multi-methodological approach to Critical Discourse Analysis, Bhatia examines beauty vlogs at the levels of socio-cognition, language, and genre to provide a better understanding of some of the measures of success and effect as well as new practices of expertise in online communication. The book contributes to a better understanding of how young people work online, often collaboratively, to conform to or resist mainstream notions of expertise, authenticity, race, and beauty; as well as the linguistic and semiotic tools they use to perform their identity, in order to become digital entrepreneurs and cultural influencers. Students and scholars in the field of discourse analysis, situated within the contexts of popular culture and social media, will find this book a valuable read. This volume also enhances the everyday person’s understanding of the complexities of new media communication and a new generation of cultural intermediaries.

This book is a multidisciplinary analysis of the meaning and dynamics of multilingualism from the perspectives of multilingual societies and language communities in the margins, who are trapped in a vicious circle of disadvantage. It analyses the social, psychological and sociolinguistic processes of linguistic dominance and hierarchical relationships among languages, discrimination, marginalisation and assertive maintenance in multilingualism characterised by a Double Divide, and shows the relationship between educational neglect of languages, capability deprivation and poverty, and loss of linguistic diversity. Its comparative analysis of language-in-education policies and practices and applications of multilingual education (MLE) in diverse contexts shows some promises and challenges in the education of indigenous/tribal/minority children. This book will be of interest to students, researchers, educators and practitioners in sociolinguistics, educational linguistics, psycholinguistics, multilingualism and bilingual/multilingual education.