Language Regard


Book Description

The first book of its kind to provide historical and state-of-the-art perspectives on language regard.




Linguistics Out of the Closet


Book Description

Queer linguistics – in its position as both a linguistic science of and for queer folk – is inherently agitating to the disciplinary anxiety of a general linguistic science. It represents, as all queer science does, a disruption of the normative modes of knowledge production and a displacement of academic authority. This collection reconsiders the placement of the queer subject, both as the researcher and as the researched, within and beyond the discipline and provides an intellectual space for the interdisciplinary (and sometimes anti-disciplinary) linguistic science of gender and sexuality. In three sections, it respectively considers the development of hyper-speciated queer linguistic subfields, the interdisciplinarity of intersectional approaches to queer language, and the institution of queer linguistic science both within and beyond the academy. Taken together, the essays in this collection confront the scientific and institutional discipline of linguistics from a queer vantage point, one which is perhaps inherently interdisciplinary in its formulation.







How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work


Book Description

Why is the gap so great between our hopes, our intentions, even ourdecisions-and what we are actually able to bring about? Even whenwe are able to make important changes-in our own lives or thegroups we lead at work-why are the changes are so frequentlyshort-lived and we are soon back to business as usual? What can wedo to transform this troubling reality? In this intensely practical book, Harvard psychologists RobertKegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey take us on a carefully guided journeydesigned to help us answer these very questions. And not justgenerally, or in the abstract. They help each of us arrive at ourown particular answers that can solve the puzzling gap between whatwe intend and what we are able to accomplish. How the Way WeTalk Can Change the Way We Work provides you with the tools tocreate a powerful new build-it-yourself mental technology.




The Social Life of Words


Book Description

A new approach to sociolinguistics, introducing the study of the social meaning of English words over time, and offering an engaging and entertaining demonstration of lexical sociolinguistic analysis The Social Life of Words: A Historical Approach explores the rise and fall of the social properties of words, charting ways in which they take on new social connotations. Written in an engaging narrative style, this entertaining text matches up sociolinguistic theory with social history and biography to discover which kind of people used what kind of word, where and when. Social factors such as class, age, race, region, gender, occupation, religion and criminality are discussed in British and American English. From familiar words such as popcorn, porridge, café, to less common words like burgoo, califont, etna, and phrases like kiss me quick, monkey parade, slap-bang shop, The Social Life of Words demonstrates some of the many ways a new word or phrase can develop social affiliations. Detailed yet accessible chapters cover key areas of historical sociolinguistics, including concepts such as social networks, communities of practice, indexicality and enregisterment, prototypes and stereotypes, polysemy, onomasiology, language regard, lexical appropriation, and more. The first book to take a focused look at lexis as a topic for sociolinguistic analysis, The Social Life of Words: Introduces sociolinguistic theories and shows how they can be applied to the lexicon Demonstrates how readers can apply sociolinguistic theory to their own analyses of words in English and other languages Provides an engaging and amusing new look at many familiar words, inviting students to explore the sociolinguistic properties of words over time for themselves Part of Wiley Blackwell’s acclaimed Language in Society series, The Social Life of Words is essential reading for upper-level undergraduate students, graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and linguists working in sociolinguistics, lexical semantics, English lexicology, and the history and development of modern English.




Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology


Book Description

Perceptual dialectology investigates what ordinary people (as opposed to professional linguists) believe about the distribution of language varieties in their own and surrounding speech communities and how they have arrived at and implement those beliefs. It studies the beliefs of the common folk about which dialects exist and, indeed, about what attitudes they have to these varieties. Some of this leads to discussion of what they believe about language in general, or folk linguistics . Surprising divergences from professional results can be found. For the professional, it is intriguing to find out why and whether the folk can be wrong or whether the professional has missed something.Volume 1 of this handbook aims to provide for the field of perceptual dialectology: a historical survey; a regional survey, adding to the earlier preponderance of studies in Japan, the Netherlands, and the United States; a methodological survey, showing, in detail, how data have been acquired and processed; an interpretive survey, showing how these data have been related to both linguistic and other socio-cultural facts; a comprehensive bibliography.The results and methods of perceptual dialectical studies should be interesting not only to linguists, variationists, dialectologists, and students of the social psychology of language but also to sociologists, anthropologists, folklorists, and other students of culture as well as to language planners and educators.







The Routledge Handbook of Language and Culture


Book Description

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Culture presents the first comprehensive survey of research on the relationship between language and culture. It provides readers with a clear and accessible introduction to both interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary studies of language and culture, and addresses key issues of language and culturally based linguistic research from a variety of perspectives and theoretical frameworks. This Handbook features thirty-three newly commissioned chapters which cover key areas such as cognitive psychology, cognitive linguistics, cognitive anthropology, linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology, and sociolinguistics offer insights into the historical development, contemporary theory, research, and practice of each topic, and explore the potential future directions of the field show readers how language and culture research can be of practical benefit to applied areas of research and practice, such as intercultural communication and second language teaching and learning. Written by a group of prominent scholars from around the globe, The Routledge Handbook of Language and Culture provides a vital resource for scholars and students working in this area.




On the Border of Language and Dialect


Book Description

This volume considers the linguistic borders between languages and dia­lects, as well as the administrative, cultural and mental borders that reflect or affect linguistic ones; it comprises eight articles examining the mental borders between dialects, dialect continua and areas of mixed dialect, language ideologies, language mixing and contact-induced language change. The book opens with Dennis R. Preston’s review article on per­ceptual dialectology, showing how this field of study provides insights on laymen’s perceptions about dialect boundaries, and how such perceptions explain regional and social variation. Johanna Laakso problematizes the common notion of languages as having clear-cut boundaries and stresses the artificialness and conventionality of linguistic borders. Vesa Koivisto introduces the Border Karelian dialects as an example of language and dialect mixing. Marjatta Palander and Helka Riionheimo’s article examines the mental boundaries between Finnish and Karelian, demonstrated by the informants when recalling their fading memories of a lost mother tongue. Niina Kunnas focuses on how speakers of White Sea Karelian perceive the boundaries between their language and other varieties. Within the framework of language ideology, Tamás Péter Szabó highlights the ways in which linguistic borders are interactionally (co)constructed in the school environment in Hungary and Finland. Anna-Riitta Lindgren and Leena Niiranen present a contact-linguistic study investigating the vocabulary of Kven, a variety lying on the fuzzy boundary of a language and a dialect. Finally, Vesa Jarva and Jenni Mikkonen approach demographically manifested linguistic boundaries by examining the Old Helsinki slang, a mixture of lexical features derived from Finnish and Swedish. Together, the articles paint a picture of a multidimensional, multilingual, variable and ever-changing linguistic reality where diverse borders, boundaries and barriers meet, intertwine and cross each other. As a whole, the articles also seek to cross disciplinary and methodological boundaries and present new perspectives on earlier studies.




Language Death


Book Description

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.