The volume presents the proceedings of an expert conference held in Dresden on the history of the German language. The papers focus particularly on the discussion of the "new" methods of "new" language history. In addition, the volume contains historical case studies from the period between 1800 and 1933. A third section concentrates on the historical links between the German language and ist Slavonic neighbours Polish, Russian and Czech.

The book sets out to extend the constricted view of linguistics that the discipline itself has favoured so far. Language performance, the >eternally recurring work of the mind

'linguistic history as a history of mentalities', 'linguistic hermeneutics', and 'affective lexis' - these are examples of the interdisciplinary concepts that Fritz Hermanns introduced to stimulate the crossover between linguistics and cultural studies. This volume presents these concepts for the first time alongside Hermanns s terminology for the analysis of political speech and his contributions to linguistic history."

In its 11 chapters, the Study Companion on Linguistics supplies detailed guidance on the main sectors of the discipline. In this 5th edition, all the chapters have been substantially extended to take account of the most important theoretical advances of the last few years. Description is not undertaken from the perspective of a specific school of thought. Instead, the aim is to provide an overview of the most significant theoretical approaches. The book can be used as a resource to draw upon in connection with introductory linguistics classes, or as a source of background knowledge on individual sectors of linguistics discussed in advanced seminars or tested in final examinations.

In our modern society with its increasing differentiation in culture and media, language and speech are also confronted with new demands and contexts for their use. In the new media, text and image become increasingly closely interwoven, and what were traditionally thought to be firm boundaries between the material forms of language - between speech and writing - appear as increasingly fluid. The volume deals with the diversity of manifestations of our language and its intermedial relations with other forms of communication, including images, body language, sounds, and music.

With "surface" and "performance," this collected volume places two concepts centre-stage that can be regarded as key terms for the object of linguistics. At the same time, they delineate the field which the papers in the volume sound out both theoretically and in empirical studies.