The rapid endangerment and death of many minority languages across the world is a matter of widespread concern, not only among linguists and anthropologists but among all concerned with issues of cultural identity in an increasingly globalized culture. By some counts, only 600 of the 6000 or so languages in the world are safe from the threat of extinction. A leading commentator and popular writer on language issues, David Crystal asks the fundamental question, Why is language death so important?, reviews the reasons for the current crisis, and investigates what is being done to reduce its impact.

This volume provides an up-to-date and comprehensive reference guide to the key concepts, ideas, movements, and trends of applied linguistics for language teaching. With over 300 hundred entries of varying length, the volume includes essential coverage of language, language learning, and language teaching. Written in an accessible style, the entries draw attention to the practical teaching implications of the ideas under discussion, and contain selected bibliographical information for further guided reading.

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Recent developments in this field of small corpus studies, largely brought about by the personal computer, have yielded remarkable insights into the nature and use of real language. This book presents work by a number of leading researchers in the field and covers a series of topics directly related to language teaching and language research. The ultimate aim of this book is to encourage the exploitation of small corpora by the ELT profession to make language learning more effective.

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Language and Social Relations

Language is closely linked to our social relationships and is the medium through which we participate in a variety of social activities. This original study explores the important role of language in various aspects of our social life, such as identity, gender relations, class, kinship, status, and hierarchies. Drawing on data from over thirty different languages and societies, it shows how language is more than simply a form of social action; it is also an effective tool with which we formulate models of social life and conduct.

Verb Meaning and the Lexicon: A First Phase Syntax

The relationship between the meaning of words and the structure of sentences is an important area of research in linguistics. Studying the connections between lexical conceptual meaning and event structural relations, this book arrives at a modular classification of verb types within English and across languages. Ramchand argues that lexical encyclopedic content and event structural aspects of meaning need to be systematically distinguished, and that thematic and aspectual relations belong to the latter domain of meaning.