Building on existing analytical frameworks, this book provides a new methodology allowing different language policies in international multilingual organisations (or “language regimes”) to be compared and evaluated on the basis of criteria such as efficiency and fairness. It explains step-by-step how to organise the evaluation of language regimes and how to design and interpret indicators for such evaluation.

This volume is intended to be a contribution to the rapidly growing field of research into Cognitive Sociolinguistics which draws on the convergence of methods and theoretical frameworks typically associated with Cognitive Linguistics and Sociolinguistics. The papers in this volume, written by internationally renowned scholars in the fields of sociolinguistics (e.g. Labov) and cognitive sociolinguistics, seek to explore and systematize the key theoretical and epistemological bases for the emergence of this socio-cognitive paradigm.

The differences among functionalist, cognitivist and/or constructionist models are generally taken to be not absolute, but rather a matter of emphasis and degree, with an increasing permeability between paradigms arising from cross-fertilizing influences. This book further explores this burgeoning area of research through the notion of functional-cognitive space, namely, the topography of the space occupied by functional, cognitivist and/or constructionist models against the background of formalist approaches in general and of Chomsky’s Minimalism in particular.

In Language Online, David Barton and Carmen Lee investigate the impact of the online world on the study of language.
The effects of language use in the digital world can be seen in every aspect of language study, and new ways of researching the field are needed. In this book the authors look at language online from a variety of perspectives, providing a solid theoretical grounding, an outline of key concepts, and practical guidance on doing research.

One set of articles offers semantic analyses of grammatical features of specific languages: English full-verb inversion; Serbo-Croatian deictic pronouns; English auxiliary do; Italian pronouns egli and lui; the Celtic-influenced use of on (e.g., ‘he played a trick on me’); a monosemic analysis of the English verb break.