Linguistics has found itself in the middle of a lively debate about its disciplinary integrity, its future and role in modern societies. The on-going discussions thrive on impulses coming from within the field and from other disciplines that either inform linguistic expertise or are themselves informed by it. They are also encouraged by a growing language awareness of individuals and entire social groups. This collection of papers covers a wide range of linguistic topics, exposing and exploring the plurilingualism of today's meta-linguistic reflection. The topics in analytical focus include the apparent integrity and the fragmentation of linguistics, starting with the early conceptions of autonomy and modularity, and ending with their elaboration in terms of interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and, more recently, postdisciplinarity of modern scholarship. The methodological pluralism of modern linguistics is shown to depend on what were and what are today the privileged modes of communication. The role of folk and expert knowledge is emphasized in the construction of metalinguistic theories and their social legitimization. Speaking up from a variety of perspectives, the contributions in this volume show that the ventriloquation of today's meta-linguistic writings is best interpretable in terms of bridges and barriers in how the metalinguistic dialogue is pursued, whether on an internal or a cross-disciplinary basis.

The book explores the role of age in communication under consideration of various age groups, genres, cultures and languages, and demonstrates the growing potential of age-related research for linguistic and social analyses that is founded on a more comprehensive and systematic basis than has been practiced so far. The volume establishes a point of contact with the work of Coupland, Giles and associates starting in the 1980s, and shows how it can be extended today to go beyond the early focus on detrimental aspects of aging. The contributors address social communication within and across age cohorts in all major age categories: the elderly, middle-aged, teenagers and children. The social skewing of the research presented explains the volume's focus on the discursive construction of social identities, with age implicated as a viable controller of how social action is strategically deployed for alignment and alienation, accommodation and divergence. The authors emphasize that a discourse construction of age and ageing is particularly important in the face of new challenges of globalization, increased human mobility and rising intergenerational conflicts.

The authors of this volume explore rhetorical and discursive strategies used to negotiate and establish legitimate knowledge and its disciplinary boundaries, to make scientific knowledge interesting outside academic settings as well, and to manage (c)overt knowledge in different social and political contexts. The volume focuses on the cultural concept of knowledge society, examining diverse linguistic means of knowledge transmission from the perspective of the complex interplay between knowledge and persuasion. The contributors discuss both sociological and philosophical issues, as well as textual processes in different genres that aim to communicate knowledge.