Reports on crime in newspapers do not provide a neutral representation of criminals and their offences but instead construct them in accordance with societal discourse surrounding this issue. This book takes an interdisciplinary approach at the intersection of Linguistics, Criminology, and Media Studies and demonstrates how Linguistics can contribute to the study of crime in the media.

Register analysis has been defined by Michael Halliday as an attempt to analyze the linguistic foundations of language we use in given situations, and the ways in which the language we speak or write varies according to the type of situation. Register analysis has been a strong research area in linguistics for several decades. Many people are now working with examples of genuine texts in the hope of establishing the linguistic features which characterize them. Text linguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics and register and genre all depend on communicative events which have taken place.

What is ‘American’ about American linguistics? Is Jakobson, who spent half his life in America, part of it? What became of Whitney’s genuinely American conception of language as a democracy? And how did developments in 20th-century American linguistics relate to broader cultural trends?This book brings together 15 years of research by John E. Joseph, including his discovery of the meeting between Whitney and Saussure, his ground-breaking work on the origins of the ‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’ and of American sociolinguistics, and his seminal examination of Bloomfield and Chomsky as readers of Saussure.

How has Applied Linguistics been defined and how has the field of Applied Linguistics developed over the last 30 years? Who were the leaders that pushed the agenda? What are the core publications in the field? Who are the authors that have been cited most and how is that related to leadership? What were the main themes in research? Why did formal linguistic theories lose so much ground and the interest in more socially oriented approaches grow? What has been the impact of Applied Linguistics on language teaching?

There was a time when good writing would be defined simply by adverting to a few literary classics. That kind of strategy is less helpful these days, when so many different styles and voices clamor for attention. What Is Good Writing? sets the terms for a contemporary debate on writing achievement by drawing on empirical research in linguistics and the other cognitive sciences that shed light on the development of fluency in language generally.