You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
He then examines aspects of their conventions to highlight the role of prepatterned and prefabricated segments whose collocational rigidity may force the inclusion of otherwise dispensable items. He finds that there is indeed significant variation across ad categories in terms of syntactic elaboration, and links this to variation in the need to be explicit, as well as in anticipation of interaction between writer and reader.
Persuasion, in its various linguistic forms, enters our lives daily. Politicians and the news media attempt to change or confirm our beliefs, while advertisers try to bend our tastes toward buying their products. Persuasion goes on in courtrooms, universities, and the business world. Persuasion pervades interpersonal relations in all social spheres, public and private. And persuasion reaches us via a large number of genres and their intricate interplay.This volume brings together nine chapters which investigate some of the typical genres of modern persuasion. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, the authors explore the linguistic features of successful (and unsuccessful) persuasion and the reasons for the variation of persuasive choices as realized in various genres: business negotiations, judicial argumentation, political speech, advertising, newspaper editorials, and news writing. In the final chapter, the editors tie together the two themes persuasion and genres by proposing an Intergenre Model. This model assumes that a powerful force behind generic evolution is the perennial need for implicit persuasion.
What is the future of languages in an increasingly globalized world? Are we moving toward the use of a single language for global communication, or are there ways of managing language diversity at the international level? Can we, or should we, maintain a balance between the global need to communicate and the maintenance of local and regional identities and cultures? What is the role of education, of language rights, of language equality in this volatile global linguistic mix? A group of leading scholars in sociolinguistics and language policy examines trends in language use across the world to find answers to these questions and to make predictions about likely outcomes. Highlighted in the discussion are, among other issues, the rapidly changing role of English, the equally rapid decline and death of small languages, the future of the major European languages, the international use of constructed languages like Esperanto, and, not least, the question of what role applied scholarship can and should play in mapping and influencing the future.
In this volume, the author argues that literacy is a complex combination of various skills, not just the ability to read and write: the technology of writing, the encoding and decoding of text symbols, the interpretation of meaning, the retrieval and display systems which organize how meaning is stored and memory. The book explores the relationship between literacy, orality and memory in classical antiquity, not only from the point of view of antiquity, but also from that of modern cognitive psychology. It examines the contemporary as well as the ancient debate about how the writing tools we possess interact and affect the product, why they should do so and how the tasks required of memory change and develop with literacy's increasing output and evoking technologies.
English in Singapore provides an up-to-date, detailed and comprehensive investigation into the various issues surrounding the sociolinguistics of English in Singapore. Rather than attempting to cover the usual topics in an overview of a variety of English in a particular country, the essays in this volume are important for identifying some of the most significant issues pertaining to the state and status of English in Singapore in modern times, and for doing so in a treatment that involves a critical evaluation of work in the field and new and thought-provoking angles for reviewing such issues in the context of Singapore in the twenty-first century. The contributions address the historical t...
The view that academic discourse is, by definition, impersonal has long been superseded. It seems unquestionable now that the interpersonal component of texts, that is, the ways in which the writers project themselves and their audience in the discourse, is an essential factor determining the success of scholarly communication and has become a fundamental issue in the field of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). Interpersonality is the key issue around which the articles in this edited book focus on. The eighteen contributions included in this volume provide a wide exploratory view of the many academic genres in which interpersonality is manifested and the various analytical approaches from...
This collection of previously unpublished, cutting-edge research discusses the conversation analysis (CA) approach to understanding language use. CA is the dominant theory for analyzing the social use of language and is concerned with the description of how speakers engage in conversation and other forms of social interaction involving language. Its proponents are not only linguists but sociologists and anthropologists as well. The unifying theme of these chapters is the intersection of practice and form through the construction of turns and sequences.
This book argues that the state in Cabo Verde is illegible since its operations, procedures, and processes are carried out through Portuguese, a language that most of the people do not understand. Consequently, the illegible state produces grave political consequences in overall political participation and the quality of democracy.
Between early childhood and adulthood, language acquisition is succeeded by a bloom of repertoire for managing interaction, a growing sensitivity to the relation of language and society, an expanding ability to wield power through the strategic use of language, and an increasing sophistication in framing speech activities. This book examines a wide range of language practices among school-age children and teenagers, using data from naturally occurring recorded talk and from careful observation of interaction in peer groups. The contributors analyze talk at play, at school, and at work, documenting the growing communicative skills of young people while always focusing on what young speakers t...
English is the common denominator that unites the work presented in this volume; it provides a focal point to illustrate the ways in which a political economic approach can account for a range of phenomena in diverse settings in which a "global" language has attained a special status as (an often perceived) tool for socioeconomic mobility. The findings reveal the complex ways in which government leaders and policymakers, as well as communities and individuals in those communities, make decisions within a global economy about the languages that will be taught as subjects or used as media of instruction in schools. Whether or not the "Straight for English" policy that has become popular in var...