The Ethnography of Communication presents the terms and concepts which are essential for discussing how and why language is used and how its use varies in different cultures.

• Presents the essential terms and concepts introduced and developed by Dell Hymes and others and surveys the most important findings and applications of their work.
  
• Draws on insights from social anthropology and psycholinguistics in investigating the patterning of communicative behavior in specific cultural settings.
  
• Includes two completely new chapters on...

This book focuses on one of the most persistent and controversial questions in modern sociolinguistics: the past and present development of African American Vernacular English (AAVE).

Written by a leading researcher in the field, this fascinating examination of the relations between grammar, text, and discourse is designed to provoke critical discussion on key issues in discourse analysis which are not always clearly identified and examined.

• Written by a leading researcher in the field
  
• Continues the enquiry into discourse analysis that Zellig Harris initiated 50 years ago, which raised a number of problematic issues that have remained unresolved ever since
  
• Introduces the notion of pretext as an additional factor in the...

Clinical Sociolinguistics examines how sociolinguistic research paradigms can be applied to assessment, diagnosis and treatment in the clinical situation.

• fills gap in the literature for speech-language pathologists by addressing how sociolinguistic research paradigms can be applied to assessment, diagnosis and treatment in the clinical situation
  
• collects newly commissioned articles written by top scholars in the field
  
• includes chapters that outline findings from sociolinguistic research over the last 40 years and point to the relevance...

Clinical Sociolinguistics examines how sociolinguistic research paradigms can be applied to assessment, diagnosis and treatment in the clinical situation.

• fills gap in the literature for speech-language pathologists by addressing how sociolinguistic research paradigms can be applied to assessment, diagnosis and treatment in the clinical situation
  
• collects newly commissioned articles written by top scholars in the field
  
• includes chapters that outline findings from sociolinguistic research over the last 40 years and point to the relevance...

Social networks -- those informal and formal social relationships of which any human society is composed -- are distinguished by their own patters of language use. Lesley Milroy is concerned with the manner in which patterns of linguisitic variation characterize particular groups (social and cultural, geographic, male and female) within a complex urban community.

This book develops the general principles of linguistic change that form the foundations of historical linguistics, dialectology and sociolinguistics.

• Demonstrates the social as well as cognitive relevance of linguistic research
• Shows that rapid linguistic change is in progress in the cities of America and England so that urban dialects are becoming more and more differentiated
• Discusses factors that govern the internal development of linguistic structures: the mechanisms of change, the constraints on change, and the ways in which change is embedded in the larger...

The study of naturally occurring connected discourse, spoken or written is one of the most promising and rapidly developing areas of linguistics. Traditional linguistics has concentrated on the analysis of single sentence or isolated speech acts. In this important new book Michael Stubbs shows that linguistic concepts can be extended to analyse spontaneous and informal talk in the home, classroom or factory, and, indeed, written narrative.

Using copious examples drawn from recorded conversations, field work observations, experimental data and written texts, he explores such...

This book fills a gap in studies of meaning by providing detailed case studies of attested corpus data on the meanings of words and phrases.

This volume provides an ethnographically rich account of sociolinguistic variation in an adolescent population.