Word frequency plays a prominent role in many scientific and applicational fields. The book presents innovative methods in research and new results important for language and text characterization. Based on a general theory, surprising interrelations are shown between word frequency and other linguistic properties. Interrelations between previously known methods and new characteristics such as the h-point and other measures developed in the book are investigated. Furthermore, new statistical tests are introduced.

This collection of papers explores the theme of phonological strength. The general notion of strength plays a central role in explaining a variety of apparently disparate phonological effects relating to language acquisition, tone and pitch accent patterns, as well as segmental distribution. The authors analyze data from a wide range of languages and from a number of current theoretical perspectives.

Pocket Essentials is a dynamic series of books that are brief, lively, and easy to read. Packed with facts as well as expert opinions, each book has all the key information you need to know about such popular topics as film, television, cult fiction, history, and more. In addition to an introduction to the subject, each topic is individually analyzed and reviewed, examining its impact on popular culture or history. There’s also a reference section that lists related web sites and weightier (and more expensive) books on the subject. For media buffs, students, and inquiring minds, these are great entry–level books that build into an essential library.

What happened to beauty?  How did the university literature classroom turn into a seminar on politics? Focusing on such writers as Don DeLillo, Virginia Woolf, and James Merrill, this book examines what has been lost to literature as a discipline, and to literary criticism as a practice, as a result of efforts to reduce the aesthetic to the ideological.  Green-Lewis and Soltan celebrate the return of beauty as a subject in its own right to literary studies, a return all the more urgent given beauty’s ability to provide not merely consolation but a sense of order and control in the context of a threatening political world.

All communication involves acts of stance, in which speakers take up positions vis-à-vis the expressive, referential, interactional and social implications of their speech. This book brings together contributions in a new and dynamic current of academic explorations of stancetaking as a sociolinguistic phenomenon. Drawing on data from such diverse contexts as advertising, tourism, historical texts, naturally occurring conversation, classroom interaction and interviews, leading authors in the field of sociolinguistics in this volume explore how linguistic stancetaking is implicated in the representation of self, personal style and acts of stylization, and self- and other-positioning.