An increasing number of business people are regularly required to communicate effectively and efficiently in a language that is not their own. The tasks that international business writers carry out, have therefore become a recent focus of attention for communication researchers and language practitioners, particularly within multinational corporations where the majority of the workforce needs to communicate both in English and the local language. Playing the Corporate Language Game explores the relationship between context and text and presents a comprehensive framework for the investigation...

The Chinese are known as an inscrutable people in the West. With the rapid globalisation of world business, China, with its booming economy and as one of the world's largest emerging markets, is attracting increasing numbers of international traders and investors. Various sources have shown that language and culture are, among other factors, two of the major obstacles to successful business collaborations between the Chinese and Westerners. This dissertation aims to help remove these obstacles by offering some insights into the intricate mechanisms of business negotiation between the Chinese...

User manuals, reference guides, project documentation, equipment specifications and other technical documents are increasingly subjected to high quality standards. However, it is not clear whether research efforts are keeping pace with this increasing importance of documentation quality. This volume includes studies from researchers as well as practitioners, exemplifying three approaches towards document quality: * Product-orientation, with an eye for usability in various manifestations such as tutorials, concept definitions, tools for users of documentation to find information, methods of...

Pragmatic Issues in Specialized Communicative Contexts, edited by Francesca Bianchi and Sara Gesuato, illustrates how interactants systematically and effectively employ micro and macro linguistic resources and textual strategies to engage in communicative practices in such specific contexts as healthcare services, TV interpreting, film dialogue, TED talks, archaeology academic communication, student-teacher communication, and multilingual classrooms. Each contribution presents a pedagogical slant, reporting on or suggesting didactic approaches to, or applications of, pragmatic aspects...

In Dynamics of Teaching and Learning Modern Hebrew as an Additional Language Yona Gilead presents original research into classroom interactional practices by offering a thick description of a successful beginner-level Modern Hebrew program at an Australian university. The book charts and theorizes the cohort's teacher and students' trajectory of using Hebrew as the main means of instructing and acquiring the language, and highlights seven key features which contribute to students' learning. The book's research-based findings and analysis of classroom dynamics contribute to theorizing...

The papers in this volume study the relationship between language use and the concept of the “tourist gaze” through a range of communicative practices from different cultures and languages. From a pragmatic perspective, the authors investigate how language constantly adapts to contextual constraints which affect tourism discourse as a strategic meaning-making process that turns insignificant places into desirable tourist destinations. The case studies draw on both, in situ interactions with visitors, such as guided tours and counter information, old and new mediatized genres, i.e. guide...

In Grounding in Chinese Written Narrative Discourse Wendan Li offers a comprehensive and innovative account of how Mandarin Chinese, as a language without extensive morphological marking, highlights (or foregrounds) major events of a narrative and demotes (or backgrounds) other supporting descriptions. Qualitative and quantitative methods in the analysis and examinations of authentic written text provide extensive evidence to demonstrate that various types of morpho-syntactic devices are used in a wide range of structural units in Chinese to mark the distinction between foregrounding and...

Tones are the most challenging aspect of learning Chinese pronunciation for adult learners and traditional research mostly attributes tonal errors to interference from learners’ native languages. In Second Language Acquisition of Mandarin Chinese Tones, Hang Zhang offers a series of cross-linguistic studies to argue that there are factors influencing tone acquisition that extend beyond the transfer of structures from learners’ first languages, and beyond characteristics extracted from Chinese. These factors include universal phonetic and phonological constraints as well as pedagogical...

The present volume, edited by Patricia Salazar-Campillo and Victòria Codina-Espurz, is a timely contribution to the field of interlanguage pragmatics. The nine chapters presented here expand the scope of research to date by including different contexts (i.e., formal instruction, stay-abroad, and online) and age groups which have received less attention (for example, young learners and adolescents). Whereas the speech act of requesting is the one that has been most explored in the field of interlanguage pragmatics, as attested by several chapters in the present volume, disagreements and...

The Logic of Narratives is a linguistic study of narrative discourse that contextualizes the ‘logical’ rather than the ‘stylistic’ aspect of narratives within the range of current issues in the interdisciplinary study of narratives being conducted in linguistics, philosophy, literature, cognitive science, and Artificial Intelligence. The book quantitatively analyzes naturally occurring narratives randomly selected from the British National Corpus (BNC) as well as James Joyce’s (1882-1941) The Dead (1914) and Fredrik Backman’s (1981-) A Man Called Ove (2012). Discourse...