This book discusses the nature of third language acquisition and trilingualism, exploring the key role that linguistic awareness plays in multilingual proficiency and language learning.

Michael Cronin looks at how translation has played a crucial role in shaping debates about identity, language and cultural survival in the past and in the present. He explores how everything from the impact of migration to the curricula for national literature courses, to the way in which nations wage war in the modern era is bound up with urgent questions of translation and identity.

Linguistic Culture and Language Policy examines how language policy in three very different nations evolved and how it is not merely the specific embodiment of rule, but rather primarily a social construct that rests on other conceptual elements such as belief systems, attitudes and myths.

In 1996, an America Online poll about Ebonics sparked more responses than did its survey on O.J. Simpson. And that's just a taste of the controversy and debate that Black English has provoked over the years. Called "Spoken Soul" by Claude Brown, author of Manchild in the Promised Land, the dialect of African Americans has been lauded, derided, questioned, and discussed for decades, but never so comprehensively and fairly as in this historic, sociologic, and linguistic overview and analysis by John Russell Rickford (the Martin Luther King Jr. Centennial Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University) and Russell John Rickford (a journalist, formerly of the Philadelphia Inquirer).

 

This clear and lucid primer fills an important need by providing a comprehensive account of the many new developments in the study of metaphor over the last twenty years and their impact on our understanding of language, culture, and the mind. Beginning with Lakoff and Johnson's seminal work in Metaphors We Live By, Kovecses outlines the development of "the cognitive linguistic theory of metaphor" by explaining key ideas on metaphor.