The quintessential A to Z guide to British English—perfect for every egghead and bluestocking looking to conquer the language barrierOscar Wilde once said the Brits have "everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language."Any visitor to Old Blighty can sympathize with Mr. Wilde. After all, even fluent English speakers can be at sixes and sevens when told to pick up the "dog and bone" or "head to the loo," so they can "spend a penny." Wh...

Covering thinkers from Aristotle to Saussure and Chomsky, "Introducing Linguistics" reveals the rules and beauty that underlie language, our most human skill.

An expat’s witty and insightful exploration of English and American cultural differences through the lens of language that will leave readers gobsmackedIn That’s Not English, the seemingly superficial differences between British and American English open the door to a deeper exploration of a historic and fascinating cultural divide. In each of the thirty chapters, Erin Moore explains a different word we use that says more about us than we think. For exampl...

Is American English in decline? Are regional dialects dying out? Is there a difference between men and women in how they adapt to linguistic variations?These questions, and more, about our language catapulted Robert MacNeil and William Cran—the authors (with Robert McCrum) of the language classic The Story of English—across the country in search of the answers. Do You Speak American? is the tale of their discoveries, which provocatively show how the standard for A...

Politeness is key to all of our relationships and plays a fundamental part in the way we communicate with each other and the way we define ourselves. It is not limited only to conventional aspects of linguistic etiquette, but encompasses all types of interpersonal behaviour through which we explore and maintain our relationships. This groundbreaking exploration navigates the reader through this fascinating area and introduces them to a variety of new insights. The book is divided into thre...

Metaphor has long provided a rich way to speak about the unspeakable, to refer to delicate issues. Sex is one such area. This book follows a cognitive-linguistic and relevance-theoretic approach to the language of sex, considering metaphor as a bridge that brings together mind and language. It does this through the analysis of the antithetical mechanisms of verbal mitigation and offence. These two mechanisms are (more commonly know as) euphemism and (its lesser known comp...

Do you find it hard to make friends? Do you struggle to know what to say to start a conversation?In this book, Paul Jordan, who is on the autism spectrum, explains how to make sense of everyday social situations you might encounter at school, university or in other group settings. He reveals how, with the use of just 65 simple words, it is possible to create 'scripts for thinking' that break conversations down into small chunks and help you to think of what to say, whether you are ...

The contributors in this collection question what kinds of relationships hold between narrative studies and the recently established field of multimodality, evaluate how we might develop an analytical vocabulary which recognizes that stories do not consist of words alone, and demonstrate the ways in which multimodality brings into fresh focus the embodied nature of narrative production and processing. Engaging with a spectrum of multimodal storytelling, from ‘low tech’ examples encompassin...

First published in 1937, this book supplies a history of the living growth of the English language from Old English to the medieval period. It offers an in-depth study of the growth of vocabulary through literature and social interaction, bringing out the fact that it is chiefly words that foreign influence has affected — leaving sentence structure almost unaltered. Isolative and combinative changes in phonology, the accidence of nouns and plurals, pronouns and adverbs, and verbs are also ...

Gender, Power and Political Speech explores the influence of gender on political speech by analyzing the performances of three female party leaders who took part in televised debates during the 2015 UK General Election campaign. The analysis considers similarities and differences between the women and their male colleagues, as well as between the women themselves; it also discusses the way gender - and its relationship to language - was taken up as an issue in media coverage of th...

Scholars of language ideology have encouraged us to reflect on and explore where social categories come from, how they have been reproduced, and whether and to what extent they are relevant to everyday interactional practices. Taking up on these issues, this book focuses on how ethnicity has been semiotically constructed, valued, and reproduced in Indonesia since Dutch colonial times, and how this category is drawn upon in everyday talk. In doing so, this book also seeks to engage with sch...

This book presents post-Marxist theoretical approaches towards social critique and offers discourse analytical tools for critical research. How is a normative critique possible? The author, working at the crossroads of sociological discourse analysis and social philosophy, answers this question and others to show how empirical discourse research can be used to develop normative critique of societies. Divided into three major sections, Herzog introduces the reader to the theoretical approac...