It is tempting to take the tremendous rate of contemporary linguistic change for granted. What is required, in fact, is a radical reinterpretation of what language is.

Stephen Roger Fischer begins his books with an examination of the modes of communication used by dolphins, birds and primates as the first contexts in which the concept of 'language' might be applied. As he charts the history of language from the times of Homo erectus, Neanderthal humans and Homo sapiens through to the nineteenth century when the science of linguistics was first developed.

A major addition to the growing body of work on communicative language teaching, this book provides a balanced introduction to the theoretical and practical aspects of communicative task design. It is targeted toward all second and foreign language teachers, and is ideal for innovative teachers who wish to develop their own tasks, or adopt/adapt those of others. The purpose of the book is to integrate recent research and practice in language teaching into a framework for analyzing learning tasks.

The Sociolinguistics of Identity (Advances in Sociolinguistics)

Identity is a problematic concept in-as-much-as we recognise it now as non-fixed, non-rigid and always being co-constructed by individuals of themselves, or by people who share certain core values or perceive another group as having such values. This volume re-examines the analytical tools employed in the sociolinguistic research of 'identity' in order to assess their efficiency, establish the roles of language in the identity claims of specific communities of people, and determine the place of identity in a variety of social contexts, including work places and language classrooms.

Language in the World: A Philosophical Enquiry (Studies in Philosophy)

What makes the words we speak mean what they do? Possible-worlds semantics articulates the view that the meanings of words contribute to determining which possible worlds would make a sentence true, and which would make it false. In the first book-length examination from this viewpoint, M.J. Cresswell argues that the nonsemantic facts on which semantic facts supervene are facts about the causal interactions between the linguistic behavior of speakers and the facts in the world that they are speaking about.

Japanese Language, Gender, and Ideology: Cultural Models and Real People (Language and Gender Series)

Japanese Language, Gender and Ideology is a collection of previously unpublished articles by established as well as promising young scholars in Japanese language and gender studies. The contributors to this edited volume argue that traditional views of language in Japan are cultural constructs created by policy makers and linguists, and that Japanese society in general, and language use in particular, are much more diverse and heterogeneous than previously understood