This collection examines the development of pragmatics as a science of language enabling the reader to critically assess its theoretical development. Issues explored include: presupposition; implicature; discourse; grammar; communication; indexicals; psychology; sociology. This work also provides useful references and suggestions of additional papers to be consulted, and has a detailed subject and name index to enable immediate access for the reader.

The study of World Englishes has seen a revolutionary shift during the last twenty years. Before 1980, there was a general assumption within Britain, the United States and many other societies where English was taught, that the primary target was the 'Standard English' of Britain. However, during the 1980s interest grew in the identification and description of global varieties of English, marking a shift in focus from 'English' to 'Englishes'.
This collection covers the full range of differing academic traditions within the subject and also addresses current theoretical approaches to the...

Concentrating on principles-and-parameters theory, this comprehensive, six-volume set presents a broad, detailed, and critical overview of what has been achieved in this important field.

This comprehensive, six-volume collection presents classic and contemporary writings on the lexicon, embracing fields as disparate as philosophy of language, cognitive linguistics, prototype theory, and corpus linguistics.

Traditionally, linguistic research has focused on the Indo-European language family - particularly English - and languages like Japanese and Chinese have not been pursued in theoretical developments. However, once scholars started to pay more attention to Japanese, its similarities to and differences from Indo-European languages not only revealed a great deal of typological variation, but also helped to provide a more accurate picture of the fundamental properties of human language.
For the past four decades, linguistic research on the Japanese language has made remarkable progress,...

Traditionally, linguistic research has focused on the Indo-European language family - particularly English - and languages like Japanese and Chinese have not been pursued in theoretical developments. However, once scholars started to pay more attention to Japanese, its similarities to and differences from Indo-European languages not only revealed a great deal of typological variation, but also helped to provide a more accurate picture of the fundamental properties of human language.
For the past four decades, linguistic research on the Japanese language has made remarkable progress,...

Language acquisition has remained a central occupation for linguistics and others in adjacent fields for the past 50 years. This new addition to the important series Critical Concepts in Linguistics documents the impressive progress of language acquisition research. It represents the interdisciplinary aspects of the field, by highlighting models and methodologies from, and implications for, adjacent fields such as psycholinguistics, developmental psychology, computer science, comparative cognition, among others. The collection points the reader to the most important and controversial issues...

Second-language acquisition was born in the late 1960s as an interdisciplinary enterprise that borrowed equally from the feeder fields of linguistics, language teaching, child language acquisition, and psychology. Since then, it has expanded considerably in scope and methodology to the point that for many, by the end of the twentieth century, it had finally reached its coming of age as an autonomous discipline, a discipline that today is more than ever undergoing change, renovation, and expansion. This six-volume collection, a new title in Routledge's Critical Concepts in Linguistics series,...