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.

Written by the world-renowned pioneer in the field of modern sociolinguistics, this volume examines the cognitive and cultural factors responsible for linguistic change, tracing the life history of these developments, from triggering events to driving forces and endpoints.

• Explores the major insights obtained by combining sociolinguistics with the results of dialect geography on a large scale
• Examines the cognitive and cultural influences responsible for linguistic change
• Demonstrates under what conditions dialects diverge from one another
• Establishes an...

Written by the world-renowned pioneer in the field of modern sociolinguistics, this volume examines the cognitive and cultural factors responsible for linguistic change, tracing the life history of these developments, from triggering events to driving forces and endpoints.

• Explores the major insights obtained by combining sociolinguistics with the results of dialect geography on a large scale
• Examines the cognitive and cultural influences responsible for linguistic change
• Demonstrates under what conditions dialects diverge from one another
• Establishes an...

Talk in Action examines the language, identity, and interaction of social institutions, introducing students to the research methodology of Conversation Analysis.

• Features a unique focus on real-world applications of CA by examining four institutional domains: calls to emergency numbers, doctor-patient interaction, courtroom trials, and mass communication,
• 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
• Showcases...

Written by the world-renowned pioneer in the field of modern sociolinguistics, this three-volume set examines the historical, social, cognitive, and cultural factors responsible for linguistic change.

• Presents the results of several decades of inquiry into the social origins and motivation of linguistic change
• Develops the general principles of linguistic change that form the foundations of historical linguistics, dialectology and sociolinguistics
• Includes the first complete report on the Philadelphia project designed to establish the social location of the leaders...