The study of native language influence in Second Language Acquisition has undergone significant changes over the past few decades. This book, which includes 12 chapters by distinguished researchers in the field of second language acquisition, traces the conceptual history of language transfer from its early role within a Contrastive Analysis framework to its current position within Universal Grammar.

This study deals with interactional processes in conversational discourse, and the way they may get 'syntacticized' into grammatical constructions. It investigates the link between discourse function and syntactic form, and the ways in which grammatical form is a reflection on communicative function, through examining the communicative functions of Left-Dislocation in English. The investigation is corpus-based, and focuses on spontaneous conversation, but other discourse types are also taken into account. The overall perspective is resolutely empirical, and preconceptions about the possible functions of Left-Dislocation are avoided.

This volume suggests a novel treatment of context in the analysis of everyday interaction. On a theoretical level, it advocates a switch of focus from 'context' as a preestablished, monolithic category which constringes co-participants' verbal and nonverbal behaviour, to an active notion of 'contextualization': in order to make oneself understood, participants have to establish and maintain those shared contextual frames which in turn are relevant to the local interpretation of their verbal and nonverbal activities.

If you read or reread Freud, it is difficult not to find on a single page references to language: from speech to text, from slip of the tongue to word play, from letter to meaning-passing inevitably through the strange notion of literal meaning, that fascinated Freud. In short, the unconscious is linked to language. How could it be otherwise, if psychoanalysis is a cure through speech as indicated as early as 1881, by Fraülein Anna O.?

Deconstructing the English Passive presents an analysis of the form and function of the passive construction in English. The book examines the structural ingredients of the passive and emphasizes the notion of an implicit argument, which sets the passive apart from other constructions with non-agentive subjects. The theoretical analysis is supported with corpus data, including a case study of the passive in academic writing.