This work comprises a collection of the writings of Ruqaiya Hasan, an influential figure in the systemic functional linguistic learning school. It discusses the relation between text and context and the realization of context in language; the 'network', which is outlined as analytic tool which can be applied at two strata of language, the lexico-grammatical and the semantic; as well as aspects of the social structure that are implicated in the way cultures and subcultures express themselves.

Among the runners of C. C. Pyle's First Annual International Transcontinental Foot Race were an assortment of underdogs, including twenty-year-old Oklahoman and part Cherokee Andy Payne, who wanted to win over the girl of his dreams and pay off the mortgage on his family's farm; Paul "Hardrock" Simpson, who was in over his head but couldn't let down his North Carolina hometown; Mike Kelly, a luckless boxer from Indiana; Seattle's Ed Gardner, one of four black runners who encountered bigotry; Charles Hart, a sixty-three-year-old Englishman hoping his best days weren't behind him; and Frank Johnson, a middle-aged husband, father, and steelworker from St. Louis who broke away from his humdrum life and dared to do something different. Newspaper and magazine journalist Geoff Williams details this historic event and the colorful cast of characters involved, based on firsthand accounts of those who were there and interviews from many living descendants. C. C. Pyle's Amazing Foot Race is a classic American story so astonishing and surreal that you have to hear it to believe it.

This book presents a unique range of interdisciplinary work on questions of language development and evolution. It makes visible the significant contribution which meaning-oriented linguistics is making to debates about the origins of language - from the perspective of language evolution in the species (viewed as the evolution of "meaning potential") to language development in the child (viewed as "learning how to mean"). As well as linguistics in the systemic functional, or Hallidayan, tradition, the book offers contributions from primatology, psychiatry, sociology and education. What the authors share is a view of language as a social semiotic system. By seeing language in this way, and drawing on actual language corpora, the authors are able to address major questions of deep social significance, including: the role of grammar in the emergence of consciousness, from protolanguage to higher order consciousness the dynamics of language variation, including semantic variation, in children's development children's learning in and about a second language the significance of different ways of talking about language for school literacy development understanding borderline personality disorder from the perspective of language development.