"Is the British press prejudiced against Muslims? In what ways can prejudice be explicit or subtle? This book uses a detailed analysis of over 140 million words of newspaper articles on Muslims and Islam, combining corpus linguistics and discourse analysis methods to produce an …
In this book John A. Hawkins argues that major patterns of variation across languages are structured by general principles of efficiency in language use and communication. Evidence for these comes from languages permitting structural options from which selections are made in per…
A delightfully witty and informative book for fans of Patricia T. O'Conner's previous bestseller Woe Is I and other popular books on language, like Eats, Shoots & Leaves and The Elements of Style. Do the British really speak better English than Americans do? Why don't French wom…
Talk at Work is a major collection of studies of language and interaction in a wide variety of institutional and workplace settings, including doctor-patient consultations, legal hearings, mass media, job interviews, visits by health visitors, psychiatric interviews, and calls t…
The native speaker is one of the central but at the same time most controversial concepts of modern linguistics. With regard to English, it became especially controversial with the rise of the so-called "New Englishes," where reality is much more complex than the neat distinctio…
Natural language: what it means and how we use it
When we think of the ways we use language, we think of face-to-face conversations, telephone conversations, reading and writing, and even talking to oneself. These are arenas of language use--theaters of action in which people do things with language. But what exactly are they d…
