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.
The Linguist offers its readers a wide range of articles that are of interest to anyone and everyone working with languages. It features job ads for linguists, as well as an IT column on websites that are of interest or relevant to professional linguists. It also includes popular regular sections such as lists of IoL events, book reviews, a section on opinion and comment as well as news items. No matter what your field is, The Linguist is informative, incisive, relevant and thus a must for every linguist.
In this presentation of his doctoral dissertation research, Lars Hinrichs outlines the discursive functions of codeswitching between Jamaican Creole (Patois) and Jamaican English in computer-mediated communication (CMC).
This book should be of both methodological and theoretical interest to scholars of CMC, writing systems and their development, interactional sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, codeswitching and language contact, creole studies, English as a World Language (EWL), and the Caribbean area and its diaspora.
