Focuses on aspects of variation and change in language use in spoken and written discourse on the basis of corpus analyses, providing new descriptive insights, and new methods of utilising small specialized corpora for the description of language variation and change.
Answering questions about the nuts and bolts of language, this is a survey of nearly everything from how sounds become speech to how names work. Along the way we find out about eyebrow flashes, whistling languages, how parents teach their children to speak, and how politeness tr…
In clear, congenial style Barry Blake explains how language works. He describes the make-up of words and how they're built from sounds and signs and put together in phrases and sentences. He examines the dynamics of conversation and the relations between the sound and meaning. H…
