Language As Discourse: Perspectives for Language Teaching
In this book Michael McCarthy and Ronald Carter describe the discoursal properties of language and demonstrate what insights this approach can offer to the student and teacher of language. The authors examine the relationship between complete texts, both spoken and written, and the social and cultural contexts in which they function. They argue that the functions of language are often best understood in a discoursal environment and that exploring language in context compels us to revise commonly-held understandings about the forms and meanings of language.
Amid the clamor of multiculturalism and ``difference'' politics, Americans wonder if their country can remain a cohesive whole. Hall (Sociology/McGill Univ., Canada) and Lindholm (Anthropology/Boston Univ.) argue that their concerns are unfounded and not all that new; for better, and sometimes for worse, they will survive.
Man About the Kitchen: Recipes for the Reluctant Chef
This guide is designed to introduce men of all ages to the kitchen and to transform them with minimal pain into competent cooks. Recipe 21: The male cook. This is becoming more popular, but has been a rarity in the past. Ingredients: this book, a man, a kitchen. First of all, show the man where the kitchen is, and sit him in a quiet corner with a copy of this book. Leave for 15 minutes, then explain to him that it really is his turn to do the cooking.
In a trial in California, Navajo defendants argue that using the hallucinogen peyote to achieve spiritual exaltation is protected by the Constitution's free exercise of religion clause, trumping the states' right to regulate them. An Ibo man from Nigeria sues Pan American World Airways for transporting his mother's corpse in a cloth sack. Her arrival for the funeral facedown in a burlap bag signifies death by suicide according to the customs of her Ibo kin, and brings great shame to the son. In Los Angeles, two Cambodian men are prosecuted for attempting to eat a four month-old puppy. The immigrants' lawyers argue that the men were following their own "national customs" and do not realize their conduct is offensive to "American sensibilities." What is the just decision in each case? When cultural practices come into conflict with the law is it legitimate to take culture into account? Is there room in modern legal systems for a cultural defense?
Human language is a phenomenon of immense richness: It provides finely nuanced means of expression that underlie the formation of culture and society; it is subject to subtle, unexpected constraints like syntactic islands and cross-over phenomena; different mutually-unintelligeable individual languages are numerous; and the descriptions of individual languages occupy thousands of pages. Recent work in linguistics, however, has tried to argue that despite all appearances to the contrary, the human biological capacity for language may be reducible to a small inventory of core cognitive competencies.
