Charles A. Ferguson – författare

This is a collection of the most influential and important work of the distinguished sociolinguist Charles A. Ferguson, ranging from studies of baby talk across cultures to analyses of the impact of literacy and religion on cultures across the world.

This is a collection of the most influential and important work of the distinguished sociolinguist Charles A. Ferguson, ranging from studies of baby talk across cultures to analyses of the impact of literacy and religion on cultures across the world.

On Conditionals provides the first major cross-disciplinary account of conditional (if-then) constructions. Conditional sentences directly reflect the language user's ability to reason about alternatives, uncertainties, and unrealised contingencies. An understanding of the conceptual and behavioural organisation involved in the construction and interpretation of these kinds of sentences therefore provides fundamental insights into the inferential strategies and the cognitive and linguistic processes of human beings. The present volume brings together studies from several perspectives - philosophical, linguistic and psychological - and aims to emphasise the intrinsic connections between the issues to be addressed and to point to new directions for interdisciplinary work.

First published in 1977, this book draws together various contributions on the area of speech used by parents with their children. Numerous perspectives on the topic include the comparison of baby talk with other simplified registers by linguists, the analysis of cross-cultural differences in mother and child interaction by anthropologists, and the relation of language development to differences in styles of childcare and the child's social environment in general by psychologists. The text had its origins in a conference sponsored by the Sociolinguistics Committee of the Social Science Research Council. It will be of value to anyone with an interest in language acquisition and development.

Language in the USA is a volume of specially commissioned studies on the language situation in America, how it came to be the way it is, and the forces of changes within it. The USA has its own unique pattern of languages: American English, the principal language, different in structure and use from other kinds of English in the world; two hundred American Indian languages, some of them flourishing as never before; Spanish, spoken in North America before English and now the second most important language in the country; a cost of immigrant languages, each with a different history of accommodation to the American scene. The book explains the place of these various languages and how they are used in education, the professions, and general communication. Language in the USA is a work of reference, which gives an accessible account of the very considerable research in this area done by linguists, sociologists, educationalists, and anthropologists.