Real Language Series – serie

Using a range of evidence Janet Holmes examines the distribution and functions of a range of specific verbal politeness strategies in women's and men's speech and discusses the possible reasons for gender differences in this area.

The proliferation of language awareness has now led to a need for a reassessment of the nature and functions of language awareness. This accessible collection of essays addresses that need in developing a more rigorous and critical theoretical underpinning for what language awareness is and should do. In particular, it argues that there needs to be a greater awareness of the social and political issues, and the context within which language awareness work is set.

Part of a sociolinguistics series about language use in the real world, and about the relationships between language, society and social change. The author argues for an approach that takes linguistic practice to be the primary medium through which social processes operate.

This case study aims to provide an insight into the language use of Afro-Caribbeans in London. It places emphasis on the linguistic background of the community and in particular on young people of the first and second British-born generations.

Aims to make available accurate information on regional variation in the use of the grammatical constructions of English, and to direct readers to those resources where further information on regional variation is available.

This text examines the wide range of issues involved in bureaucratic language, illustrating the complex inter-relationships between language, bureaucracy and social control. The authors use real life, varying data in their analysis, taken from institutions in the UK, Netherlands and Belgium.

This text examines literacy, politics and social change, the ethnography of literacy and literacy in education, and explores a new critical framework.

Challenges the dichotomy of female and male use of language, addressing the political and social consequences of popular beliefs about women's language' and 'men's language' and proposing new ways of looking at language and gender.

Exploring how attitudes and cultural assumptions about children and childhood are revealed in contemporary English, this text addresses such questions as: How is concern for children's safety and welfare reflected in the vocabulary and grammar of contemporary English?

Uncovering the reason why students plagiarize, this text explains what can be done about it. It challenges the concepts of original authorship and ownership of language and shows that plagiarism is a complex and contested subject.

The concept of social power, who holds it and how they use it is a widely debated subject particularly in the field of discourse analysis, and the wider arena of sociolinguistics.In her new book,Joanna Thornborrow challenges the received notion that power is necessarily held by some speakers and not by others. Through the detailed analysis of communication and interaction within a range of institutional settings, she examines power as an emerging, negotiated phenomenon between participants with different status and goals. Written in a clear style which combines attention to technical detail with accessibility, Power Talk includes:a comprehensive introduction to the theme of power including the analytic approaches to power in language a wide-ranging discussion of theory and practice and, in-depth contemporary case studies.Power Talk is the first book to focus on the topic of power in situated interaction across a range of contexts. As such, it makes a timely, and important contribution to the debate surrounding social power and language use, and will be of value to both students and researchers alike.

Real Language Series General Editors:Jennifer Coates, Jenny Cheshire, Euan Reid This is a sociolinguistics series about the relationships between language, society and social change. Books in the series draw on natural language data from a wide range of social contexts. The series takes a critical approach to the subject, challenging current orthodoxies, and dealing with familiar topics in new ways. Gender and Discourse offers a critical new approach to the study of language and gender studies. Women moving into the public domains of power traditionally monopolised by men are creating new identities for themselves, and the language that is used by them and about them offers an insight into gender roles. Clare Walsh reviews the current dominance/difference debates, and proposes a new analytical framework which combines the insights of critical discourse and feminist perspectives on discourse to provide a new perspective on the role of women in public life. A superbly accessible book designed for students and researchers in the field, the book features: - topical case studies from the arenas of politics, religion and activism- a new analytical framework, also summarised in chart form so the reader can apply their own critical analyses of texts. - written and visual text types for the reader's own linguistic and semiotic analysis. 'This important book takes up a neglected question in the study of language and gender - what difference women make to the discourse of historically male-dominated institutions - and brings to bear on it both the insights of feminist scholarship and evidence from women's own testimony. Clare Walsh's analysis of the dilemmas women face is both subtle and incisive, taking us beyond popular 'Mars and Venus' stereotypes and posing some hard questions for fashionable theories of language, identity and performance.

Social Literacies develops new and critical approaches to the understanding of literacy in an international perspective. It represents part of the current trend towards a broader consideration of literacy as social practices, and as its title suggests, it focuses on the social nature of reading and writing and the multiple character of literacy practices.

The proliferation of language awareness has now led to a need for a reassessment of the nature and functions of language awareness. This accessible collection of essays addresses that need in developing a more rigorous and critical theoretical underpinning for what language awareness is and should do. In particular, it argues that there needs to be a greater awareness of the social and political issues, and the context within which language awareness work is set.

While it is accepted that the pronunciation of English shows wide regional differences, there is a marked tendency to under-estimate the extent of the variation in grammar that exists within the British Isles today. In addressing this problem, Real English brings together the work of a number of experts on the subject to provide a pioneer volume in the field of the grammar of spoken English.

The concept of social power, who holds it and how they use it is a widely debated subject particularly in the field of discourse analysis, and the wider arena of sociolinguistics.In her new book,Joanna Thornborrow challenges the received notion that power is necessarily held by some speakers and not by others. Through the detailed analysis of communication and interaction within a range of institutional settings, she examines power as an emerging, negotiated phenomenon between participants with different status and goals. Written in a clear style which combines attention to technical detail with accessibility, Power Talk includes:a comprehensive introduction to the theme of power including the analytic approaches to power in language a wide-ranging discussion of theory and practice and, in-depth contemporary case studies.Power Talk is the first book to focus on the topic of power in situated interaction across a range of contexts. As such, it makes a timely, and important contribution to the debate surrounding social power and language use, and will be of value to both students and researchers alike.

Rethinking Language and Gender Research is the first book focusing on language and gender to explicitly challenge the dichotomy of female and male use of language. It represents a turning point in language and gender studies, addressing the political and social consequences of popular beliefs about women's language and men's language and proposing new ways of looking at language and gender. The essays take a fresh approach to the study of subjects such as language and sex and the use of language to produce and maintain power and prestige. Topics explored in this text include sex and the brain; the language of a rape hearing; teenage language; radio talk show exchanges; discourse strategies of African American women; political implications for language and gender studies; the relationship between sex and gender and the construction of identity through language.A useful introductory chapter sets the articles in context, explaining the relationships that exist between them, and full cross-referencing between articles and an extensive index allow for easy access to information. The interdisciplinary approach of the text, the wide-range of methodologies presented, and the comprehensive review of the current literature will make this book invaluable reading for all upper-level undergraduate students, postgraduate students and researchers in the fields of linguistics, sociolinguistics, gender and cultural studies.

Real Language Series General Editors:Jennifer Coates, Jenny Cheshire, Euan Reid This is a sociolinguistics series about the relationships between language, society and social change. Books in the series draw on natural language data from a wide range of social contexts. The series takes a critical approach to the subject, challenging current orthodoxies, and dealing with familiar topics in new ways. Gender and Discourse offers a critical new approach to the study of language and gender studies. Women moving into the public domains of power traditionally monopolised by men are creating new identities for themselves, and the language that is used by them and about them offers an insight into gender roles. Clare Walsh reviews the current dominance/difference debates, and proposes a new analytical framework which combines the insights of critical discourse and feminist perspectives on discourse to provide a new perspective on the role of women in public life. A superbly accessible book designed for students and researchers in the field, the book features: - topical case studies from the arenas of politics, religion and activism- a new analytical framework, also summarised in chart form so the reader can apply their own critical analyses of texts. - written and visual text types for the reader's own linguistic and semiotic analysis. 'This important book takes up a neglected question in the study of language and gender - what difference women make to the discourse of historically male-dominated institutions - and brings to bear on it both the insights of feminist scholarship and evidence from women's own testimony. Clare Walsh's analysis of the dilemmas women face is both subtle and incisive, taking us beyond popular 'Mars and Venus' stereotypes and posing some hard questions for fashionable theories of language, identity and performance.

Real Language SeriesGeneral Editors-Jennifer Coates, Jenny Cheshire and Euan ReidThis is a sociolinguistic series about the relationships between language, society and social change. Books in the series draw on natural language data from a wide range of social contexts. The series takes a critical approach to the subject, challenging current orthodoxies, and dealing with familiar topics in new ways. The topic of plagiarism is a highly contentious issue and one that is of growing interest and importance in higher education across the world. Stolen Language? Plagiarism in Writing uncovers the reasons why students plagiarize, and explains what can be done about it. It challenges the concepts of original authorship of language, tracing the notion of plagiarism to the introduction of copyright laws in the eighteenth century. The analysis presented in this book explores plagiarism as complex and contested, and suggests that in student academic writing it may be the surface manifestation of learning difficulties related to the educational environment, the nature of academic discourse and the nature of language.Underlying the concept of plagiarism is the premise that meaning is made by the individual, using the system of language at his or her disposal. The words and ideas then belong to the individual who first thought of them, or who first used these words in a particular way. New understandings, that language and cognition are fundamentally social and cultural, contest the idea of 'original thought' or 'original language'. In addition, what constitutes plagiarism differs depending on the genre and context of writing.Stolen Language shows that there is in any good writing an authorial presence, an authorial voice which is particularly difficult for the novice writer to control when constructing an essay based on multiple texts. Written in a unique and accessible way, the book also looks at the particular difficulties experienced by writers of English as an additional language and provides a practical framework for academics and teachers of writing on how to develop authorial voice and critical thinking in the student writer.

London Jamaican provides the reader with a new perspective on African descent in London. Based on research carried out in the early 1980s, the author examines the linguistic background of the community, with special emphasis on young people of the first and second British-born generations.

Childly Language explores how attitudes and cultural assumptions about children and childhood are revealed in contemporary English. It addresses such questions as: How is concern for children's safety and welfare reflected in the vocabulary and grammar of contemporary English? and When we say that an adult is being 'childish', what are we saying about the characteristics of children?

This book discusses and explores the relationship between language and world view. David Lee presents recent research in linguistics, drawing together strands from a number of different areas of the subject: the nature of linguistic and conceptual categories, the role of metaphor in the everyday use of language, gender differentiation and social variation in speech.In this study, David Lee considers a broad range of issues in the light of two contrasting views on language. For much of its history, linguistics has been dominated by a tradition which sees individual languages as uniform, homogenous systems. However, there has always been an opposite view emphasising the complex tensions and cross-currents inherent in linguistic usage. This alternative perspective is explored in the analysis of a wide range of literary and non-literary texts: casual conversations, interviews, newspaper reports, official memoranda, television commercials and extracts from novels. The author describes how both spoken and written texts can be seen as the sites where tensions between "competing discourses", stemming from different social positions and perspectives, are illustrated.

Language, Bureaucracy and Social Control explores the varying inter-relationships between language, forms of bureaucratic organisation and social control. The text provides a detailed examination of the discursive dimensions of some of the key techniques of modern power: the 'productive' surveillance practices of administrative and public service institutions. Special attention is paid to recent developments within the state domain and the private economy such as the introduction of consumerism and promotional practices in welfare institutions, and the spread of bureaucratisation in contexts such as banking and education.