Placing failed humor within the broader category of miscommunication and drawing on a range of conversational data, this text represents the first comprehensive study of failed humor. It provides a framework for classifying the types of failure that can occur, examines the strategies used by both speakers and hearers to avoid and manage failure, and highlights the crucial role humor plays in social identity and relationship management.

Sociolinguistics of Style and Social Class in Contemporary Athens (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture)

This ethnographic study deals with the ways people in Athens, Greece, use style to construct their social class identities. Including a rich dataset comprising ethnographic interviews with actual people who live in the stereotypically seen as leafy and posh northern suburbs and in the stereotypically treated as working class western suburbs of Athens coupled with data from popular literary novels, TV series and Greek hip hop music, it argues that the relationship between style and social class identity is mediated by complex social meanings encompassing features from and discourses relevant to both areas.

The book examines women’s language as an ideological construct historically created by discourse. The aim is to demonstrate, by delineating a genealogy of Japanese women’s language, that, to deconstruct and denaturalize the relationships between gender and any language, and to account for why and how they are related as they are, we must consider history, discourse and ideology.

The Discursive Construction of the Scots Language: Education, politics and everyday life (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture)

This monograph is about how the Scots language is discursively constructed, both from ‘above’ (through texts such as educational policies, debates in parliament and official websites) and from ‘below’ (in focus group discussions among Scottish people). It uses the interdisciplinary discourse-historical approach to critical discourse analysis to examine what discursive strategies are used in different texts, and also to investigate salient features of context.

Multilingualism is everywhere in a globalized society. This book looks at the origins and development of languages, at language contact and competition, and at the emergence and the consequences of multilingualism. Edwards also examines lingua francas, pidgins, creoles and artificial languages as a part of a broader snapshot of the social life of language.
This compelling short introduction is required reading for all entry-level students of multilingualism, and a primer for language lovers in general.