Projects in Linguistics: A Practical Guide to Researching Language
Projects in Linguistics is a unique and essential guide for anyone doing a research project in language and linguistics. With orientation overviews of the main areas of enquiry typically targeted by students, it offers practical help in identifying a topic, finding background reading, planning and designing a study, collecting and analysing data, and writing a convincing account.
Doing Applied Linguistics provides a concise, lively and accessible introduction to the field of applied linguistics for readers who have little or no prior knowledge of the subject. The book explores the basics of the field then goes on to examine in more depth what applied linguists actually do, and the types of research methods that are most frequently used in the field.
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.
The Cognitive Linguistics Reader (Advances in Cognitive Linguistics)
Cognitive Linguistics is the most rapidly expanding school in modern Linguistics. It aims to create a scientific approach to the study of language, incorporating the tools of philosophy, neuroscience and computer science. Cognitive approaches to language were initially based on philosophical thinking about the mind, but more recent work emphasizes the importance of convergent evidence from a broad empirical and methodological base.
Language is people talking and writing. It is a concrete, tangible aspect of human behaviour. So, if we want to deepen our understanding of language, our best way forward is to apply the same empirical techniques which have deepened our understanding of other observable aspects of the universe during the four centuries since Galileo. Listen, look.