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This book investigates linguistic variation as a complex continuum of language use from standard to nonstandard. In our view, these notions can only be established through mutual definition, and they cannot exist without the opposite pole. What is considered standard English changes according to the approach at hand, and the nonstandard changes accordingly. This book offers an interdisciplinary and multifaceted approach to this central theme of wide interest.The articles approach writing in nonstandard language through various disciplines and methodologies: sociolinguistics, pragmatics, historical linguistics, dialectology, corpus linguistics, and ideological and political points of view. The theories and methods from these fields are applied to material that ranges from nonliterary writing to canonized authors. Dialects, regional varieties and worldwide Englishes are also addressed.
Providing an ideal introduction to historical pragmatics, this guide gives students a solid grounding in historical pragmatics and teaches the methodology needed to analyse language in social, cultural and historical contexts. Using a number of case studies including politeness, news discourse, and scientific discourse, this book provides new insights into the analysis of discourse markers, interjections, terms of address and speech acts. Through focusing on the methodological problems in using historical data, students learn the key concepts in historical pragmatics, as well as covering recent work at the interface of between language and literature.
Topics covered in this volume include: the system of Czech bound address forms until 1700; Spanish forms of address in the 16th century; and pronominal usage in Shakespeare.
Current Trends in Narratology offers an overview of cutting-edge approaches to theories of storytelling. It describes the move to cognition, the new emphasis on non-prose and multimedia narratives, and introduces a third field of research - comparative narratology. This research addresses how local institutions and national approaches have affected the development of narratology. Leading researchers detail their newest scholarship while placing it within the scope of larger international trends.
Medical writing tells us a great deal about how the language of science has developed in constructing and communicating knowledge in English. This volume provides a new perspective on the evolution of the special language of medicine, based on the electronic corpus of Early Modern English Medical Texts, containing over two million words of medical writing from 1500 to 1700. The book presents results from large-scale empirical research on the new materials and provides a more detailed and diversified picture of domain-specific developments than any previous book. Three introductory chapters provide the sociohistorical, disciplinary and textual frame for nine empirical studies, which address a range of key issues in a wide variety of medical genres from fresh angles. The book is useful for researchers and students within several fields, including the development of special languages, genre and register analysis, (historical) corpus linguistics, historical pragmatics, and medical and cultural history.
The first volume to focus on the communicative aspects of English manuscripts from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century. It demonstrates how these handwritten texts can be used to analyse the history of language as communication between individuals and groups, and discusses the challenges these documents present to present-day scholars.
This volume and its companion one (English Historical Syntax and Morphology, CILT 223) offer a selection of papers from the Eleventh International Conference on English Historical Linguistics held at the University of Santiago de Compostela. From the rich programme (over 130 papers were given during the conference), the present thirteen papers were carefully selected to reflect the state of current research in the field of English historical linguistics. The areas represented in the volume are lexis and semantics, text-types, historical sociolinguistics and dialectology, and phonology. Many of the articles tackle questions of change and linguistic periodization through the use of methodological tools like corpora, linguistic atlases, thesauri and historical dictionaries. The theoretical frameworks adopted include, among others, multi-dimensional analysis, systemic-functional grammar, Communication Accommodation Theory, historical discourse analysis and Optimality Theory.
From the Middle Ages up to the present day, this book traces politeness in the history of the English language.
The study of genre is scattered across research disciplines. This volume offers an integrative perspective starting from the assumption that genres are cognitive constructs, recognized, maintained and employed by members of a given discourse community. Its central questions are: What does genre knowledge consist of? How is it organized in cognition? How is it applied in discourse production and interpretation? How is it reflected in language use?
The book provides new findings about the grammar of genres and styles. It combines new methods with different kinds of empirical material, from social reports to live TV sports commentaries or 16th century newspapers, in English, French, Latin and Spanish. The study of non-discrete units suggests new ways of seeing the linguistic variation between genres and styles and the ways in which belonging to a genre predetermines linguistic choices.