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This course explores the interaction between language and social interactions. Topics focus on language use in different regional settings and different social contexts. Among the socio-demographic variables included for analysis are age, gender, social class and multilingual communities, and included among the socio-pragmatic factors are register, power relations and social networks. Special attention is given to the appreciation of language variation and diversity and the development of intercultural sensitivity.
This book examines the role of language in a variety of social contexts, considering both how language works and how it can be used to signal and interpret various aspects of social identity. Divided into three parts, the book discusses multilingual speech communities, and language variations focusing on users and uses. This sixth edition includes new material on gender, social media and online use of language, codeswitching, and language policy, as well as translanguaging, memes, and identity construction, with revised examples and exercises that include new material from Asia and South America.
This book is about the principles for constructing polite speech. The authors describe and account for some remarkable parallelisms in the linguistic construction of utterances with which people express themselves in different languages and cultures. A motive for these parallels is isolated and a universal model is constructed outlining the abstract principles underlying polite usages. This is based on the detailed study of three unrelated languages and cultures: the Tamil of South India, the Tzeltal spoken by Mayan Indians in Chiapas, Mexico, and the English of the USA and England.
This book examines the place of the news interview in Anglo-American society, and considers its historical development in the United States and Britain. The main body of the book discusses the fundamental norms and conventions that shape conduct in the modern interview; it explores the particular recurrent practices through which journalists balance competing professional norms that encourage both objective and adversarial treatment of public figures. It also explores how, in the face of aggressive questioning, politicians and other public figures struggle to stay “on message” and pursue their own agendas.
This book is a reader for the study of bilingualism. Divided into three parts, it looks into sociolinguistic dimensions of bilingualism, linguistic dimensions of bilingualism, psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic dimensions of bilingualism. The book covers definitions and typology of bilingualism, language choice and bilingual interaction, bilingualism, identity and ideology, grammar of code-switching and bilingual acquisition, bilingual production and perception, the bilingual brain, and methodological issues in the study of bilingualism. This second edition includes nine new chapters and postscripts written by the authors of the original articles, who evaluate them in the light of recent research.
This book examines the language, identity, and interaction of social institutions, introducing students to the research methodology of Conversation Analysis. It provides a theoretical and methodological overview of the roots of CA, reviewing the main developments and findings of research on talk and social institutions conducted over the past 25 years. The book begins with a theoretical and methodological overview of conversation analysis and its application to occupations and institutions, followed by real-world applications of CA by examining four main institutional domains- calls to 911 emergency, doctor-patient interaction, courtroom trials, and mass communication.
Like Roland Barthes' well-known book, L’Empire des signes, from which the title of the present collection is taken, this book contains thirteen essays dealing with certain aspects, with a mildly semiotic orientation, in the Japanese culture. The book begins with an introduction focusing on semiotics, culture, and Roland Barthes. In the following essays, Yoshihiko Ikegami and his colleagues are concerned with signifying (or meaning-generating) activity (whether based on a covert code, or directed toward changing the established code, or in fact, introducing a new code) observable in the specific cultural spheres they are dealing with.
This book presents a rhetorical model of pragmatics: that is, a model which studies linguistic communication in terms of communicative goals and principles of 'good communicative behaviour'. It argues that pragmatics differs from grammar in that it is essentially goal-directed and evaluative. The book's main focus is on the development of a model of pragmatics within an overall functional model of language, in which it builds on the speech avct theory of Austin and Searle, and the theory of conversational implicature of Grice, but at the same time enlarges pragmatics to include politeness, irony, phatic communion, and other social principles of linguistic behaviour.
This book is a practical guide to the main concepts and challenges of intercultural communication. Grounded in interactional sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, this work integrates theoretical principles and methodological advice, with its focuses on intercultural professional communication in English between westerners and East Asians, especially Chinese, and on organizational communication and communication across the so-called generations gap. It is an interactive sociolinguistic framework for analyzing discourse which crosses the boundaries between these discourse systems. This third edition features new original theory, expanded treatment of generations, gender and corporate and professional discourse.
