Kategoria BISAC: Language Arts & Disciplines >> Linguistics - Sociolinguistics

This classic volume, by a well-known linguist, constitutes a systematic introduction to sociolinguistics, unmatched in the clarity and forcefulness of its approach, and to the study of language in its social setting.

Sociolinguistics is conceived here as a fundamental critical perspective on the whole of the study of language. The scientific problems within present linguistics, the book contends, combine with social problems of the society in which linguists participate to press linguistics to discover ethnographic foundations. The work of providing such foundations largely remains to be done. Working out the implications of these three principles requires a new mode of description of linguistic features and relationships, a mode which can treat the verbal means of a community as a part of its...

Languages and Their Speakers provides an introduction both to languages themselves and to their social functions. Written especially for nonlinguistic majors, the book gives insight into the meaning, value, and function of language within a culture and into the ways language behavior varies and changes. Each chapter of the book discusses what it means to be a speaker of a particular language, and puts the language in context among the languages of the world.

The book explores how people know their languages--know them as grammatical systems and know them as part of a cultural...

"A book] rich in detail and analysis, which anyone wanting to understand the language debate in Puerto Rico will find essential."--Arlene Davila, Syracuse University

This is the first book in English to analyze the controversial language policies passed by the Puerto Rican government in the 1990s. It is also the first to explore the connections between language and cultural identity and politics on the Caribbean island.
Shortly after the U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico in 1898, both English and Spanish became official languages of the territory. In 1991, the Puerto Rican government...

In July 1992 Senator Robert C. Byrd (D-WV) angrily suggested during floor debate... that the United States should not continue accepting immigrants mho speak no English. "I pick up the telephone and call the local garage," Byrd said. "I can't understand the person on the other side of the line. I'm not sure he can understand me. They're all over the place, and they don't speak English. We want more of this?" Later he apologized for the remark, saying, "I regret that in the heat of the moment I spoke unwisely."

Is America in the midst of another backlash against foreigners? In the...

-I am my language, - says the poet Gloria Anzaldua, because language is at the heart of who we are. But what happens when a person has more than one language? Is there an overlay of language on identity, and do we shift identities as we shift languages? More important, what identities do children construct for themselves when they use different languages in particular ways?

In this book, Norma Gonzalez uses language as a window on the multiple levels of identity construction in children--as well as on the complexities of life in the borderlands--to explore language practices...

When Mao and the Chinese Communist Party won power in 1949, they were determined to create new, revolutionary human beings. Their most precise instrument of ideological transformation was a massive program of linguistic engineering. They taught everyone a new political vocabulary, gave old words new meanings, converted traditional terms to revolutionary purposes, suppressed words that expressed incorrect thought, and required the whole population to recite slogans, stock phrases, and scripts that gave correct linguistic form to correct thought. They assumed that constant repetition would...

Applied Linguistics as Social Science surveys the increasing dialogue between linguistics and social theory. The book shows how social theory, applied linguistics and sociolinguistics share a set of common concerns, and how an analysis of these to produce a social scientific account of applied linguistics helps to explain the interaction between social structures, human agents and language. Foreword - Introduction - Making connections: some key issues in social theory and applied linguistics - Sociology and ideas about language - Language as a cultural emergent property - Researching...

This comprehensive introduction to intercultural pragmatics examines the theoretical, methodological and practical issues in the analysis of talk across cultures.

The book includes:
* introduction to the key issues in culture and communication
* examination of cross-cultural and intercultural communication
* empirical case studies from a variety of languages, including German, Greek, Japanese and Chinese
* practical chapters on pragmatics research, recording and analysing data, and projects in intercultural pragmatics
* exercises at the end of each chapter
*...

This collection of different perspectives on language variation serves as a companion volume to New Ways of Analyzing Variation in English.

Fifteen research linguists discuss the varieties of Spanish spoken in California, Iowa, Indiana, Louisiana, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, and Texas. They variously address language maintenance, syntactic variation, lexicography, language use and language teaching, and include studies on socioeconomic, political, and cultural aspects of language in the Spanish-speaking communities in the United States.