Most of us will have been through the trauma of a listening exam (or aural) at some point. Until relatively recently prevailing wisdom saw the aural as an adjunct to the oral and teaching methods were geared around that relationship. Michael Rost, however, treats listening as a quite distinct field of enquiry and endeavour. The book provides a thorough and practical treatment of both the linguistic and pragmatic processes that are involved in oral language use from the perspective of the listener.
Speaking is a dynamic, interpersonal process and one that strongly influences how we are perceived by others in a range of formal and everyday contexts. Despite this, speaking is often researched and taught as if it is simply writing delivered in a different mode. In Teaching and Researching Speaking, Rebecca Hughes suggests that we have less understanding than we might of important meaning-making aspects of speech such as prosody, gaze, affect (how language makes us feel) and the ways speakers collaborate and negotiate with one another in interaction.
Language Variation and Change is the only journal dedicated exclusively to the study of linguistic variation and the capacity to deal with systematic and inherent variation in synchronic and diachronic linguistics. Sociolinguistics involves analysing the interaction of language, culture and society; the more specific study of variation is concerned with the impact of this interaction on the structures and processes of traditional linguistics. It concentrates on the details of linguistic structure in actual speech production and processing (or writing), including contemporary or historical sources.
Why do we say a person is a 'wally'? Or makes money 'hand over fist'? Or is the 'spitting image' of someone else? Why is a 'loo' so called? Why do we 'take a rain-check'? Why shouldn't you 'teach your grandmother to suck eggs'? These are the sort of questions that normal dictionaries duck out of by saying 'orig. obsc.' or 'orig. uncert.' or 'orig. unknown'. The purpose of Why Do We Say . . . ? is to compare the many explanations on offer and to test them, even if in the end it serves to emphasize that in this field hard and fast conclusions are difficult to come by.
Translation is living through a period of revolutionary upheaval. The effects of digital technology and the internet on translation are continuous, widespread and profound. From automatic online translation services to the rise of crowdsourced translation and the proliferation of translation Apps for smartphones, the translation revolution is everywhere. The implications for human languages, cultures and society of this revolution are radical and far-reaching. In the Information Age that is the Translation Age, new ways of talking and thinking about translation which take full account of the dramatic changes in the digital sphere are urgently required.
