Linguistics

This book shows how Internet and mobile technologies — including instant messaging (IM), cell phones, multitasking, social networking Web sites, blogs, and wikis — are profoundly influencing the way we read and write, speak and listen, but not in the ways we might suppose. The book looks at language in an online and mobile world. It reveals for instance that email, IM, and text messaging have had surprisingly little impact on student writing. Electronic media has magnified the laid-back “whatever” attitude toward formal writing that young people everywhere have embraced, but it is not a cause of it. A more troubling trend, according to the book, is the myriad ways in which we block incoming IMs, camouflage ourselves on Facebook, and use ring tones or caller ID to screen incoming calls on our mobile phones. The book argues that our ability to decide who to talk to is likely to be among the most lasting influences that information and communication technology has upon the ways we communicate with one another. Moreover, as more and more people are “always on” one technology or another — whether communicating, working, or just surfing the web or playing games — we have to ask what kind of people do we become, as individuals and as family members or friends, if the relationships we form must increasingly compete for our attention with digital media?

The first introduction to the field of Arabic sociolinguistics, this book discusses major trends in research on diglossia, code-switching, gendered discourse, language variation and change, and language policies in relation to Arabic. In doing so, it introduces and evaluates the various theoretical approaches, and illustrates the usefulness and the limitations of these approaches with empirical data. The book shows how sociolinguistic theories can be applied to Arabic and, conversely, what the study of Arabic can contribute to our understanding of the function of language in society.

Language is not just a means of communication but also a powerful symbol of identity in society at the individual, Self, and group levels. This symbolic role of language comes to the fore under conditions of war, conflict, displacement and persistent cultural anxiety in society. Using autoethnography and autobiography, the book provides a novel way of investigating these issues in the Middle East using Arabic as a paradigmatic case. A study of personal names, the linguistic landscape, place names, and code-names further links language to war, conflict, displacement and diasporisation at the level of the group and the individual. In the process issues of trauma and globalization are woven into this array of themes, revealing the complexity of the language-identity link in society. The book frames its findings against a wide-ranging critique of the dominant, correlational approach in Arabic sociolinguitics. It argues that this approach does not exploit the link between language and the major narratives of identity and conflict in the Middle East. The book argues for combining this approach with qualitative studies that are nevertheless aware of the limits of interpretation and the positionality of the researcher. The book further argues that through this combined endeavour a richer and more complex understanding of the socio-political underpinnings of language can be generated to help bridge the gaps between the various disciplines and areas of study that converge on language a a field of investigation and analysis.

This book examines issues of language, identity, and culture among the rapidly growing Asian Pacific American (APA) population. The distinguished contributors—who represent a broad range of perspectives from anthropology, sociolinguistics, English, and education—focus on the analysis of spoken interaction and explore multiple facets of the APA experience. The book covers topics such as media representations of APAs; codeswitching and language crossing; and narratives of ethnic identity. The collection examines the experiences of Asian Pacific Americans of different ethnicities, generations, ages, and geographic locations across home, school, community, and performance sites.

The main goal of this book is to demonstrate that the languages and dialects of Europe are becoming increasingly alike. This unifying process — that goes at least as far back as the Roman empire — is accelerating and affects every one of Europe’s 150 or so languages, including those of different families such as Basque and Finnish. The changes are by no means restricted to lexical borrowing, but involve every grammatical aspect of the language. They are usually so minute that neither native speakers nor trained linguists notice them. But they accumulate and give rise to new grammatical structures that lead, in turn, to new patterns of areal relationship. The book describes linguistic transfer from one language to another in terms of grammatical replication, using grammaticalization theory as a framework. The linguistic domains covered in more detail are definite and indefinite articles, possession, case marking, and the relationship between questions and subordination.

The Pacific is historically an area of enormous linguistic diversity, where talk figures as a central component of social life. Pacific communities, from Polynesia to Melanesia, also represent diverse contact zones—between indigenous and introduced institutions and ideas, between local actors and outsiders; and involving different lingua francas and colonial and local language varieties. Contact between colonial and post-colonial governments, religious institutions (including Christian missions), and indigenous communities has spurred profound social and linguistic change, simultaneously and irrevocably transforming language ideologies, reflexive sensibilities about languages, and language use and practices. Drawing on ethnographic, historical, and linguistic analyses, this volume examines situations of intertwined linguistic and cultural change unfolding in specific Pacific locations in the 20th and early 21st centuries. Its overarching concern is with the multiple ways that processes of historical change have shaped and been shaped by linguistic ideologies held by Pacific peoples and other agents of change. The chapters demonstrate that language and linguistic practices are linked to changing consciousness of self and community, through notions of agency, identity, morality, affect, authority, and authenticity.

Contact Linguistics is a critical investigation of grammatical structures when bilingual speakers use their two or more languages in the same clause. Myers-Scotton examines major contact phenomena, such as lexical borrowing, convergence, attrition, mixed languages, and creole formation, but especially codeswitching. She argues that different contact phenomena result from the same grammatical principles and processes. They provide a set of limited options so that predictions are possible about expected outcomes, even if social milieux differ. She extends her earlier analysis of codeswitching under the Matrix Language Frame model and develops further the role of asymmetry and the Uniform Structure Principle in contact phenomena in general. Two new models make analyses more precise. The 4-M model of morpheme classification recognizes the abstract basis of four types of morphemes and their differential distribution across contact phenomena. The Abstract Level model proposes that new lexical elements are formed by splitting and recombining levels of abstract structure.

This book describes and illustrates eleven powerful conversational strategies used by undercover police officers and cooperating witnesses who secretly tape-record targets in criminal investigations. Twelve actual criminal case studies are used as examples. These strategies creating illusion of guilt include the apparently deliberate use of semantic ambiguity, blocking the targets’ words (by creating static on the tape, interrupting them, speaking on their behalf, and manipulating the off/on switch); rapidly changing the subject before targets can respond (the “hit and run” strategy); contaminating the tape with irrelevant information that can make targets appear to be guilty; camouflaging illegality by making actions appear to be legal; isolating targets from important information that they need in order to make informed choices; inaccurately restating things the target has said; withholding crucial information from targets; lying to targets about critical information; and scripting targets in what to say on tape. These conversational strategies gain power from the fact that the targets do not know that they are being recorded, and often let things go right by them during the discourse. Nor do they know that the real audience of the conversations consists of later jury listeners, who do not know the full context of these conversations. Unlike everyday, unrecorded conversation, the most critical listening takes place at a future time and under very different circumstances. It is shown that undercover officers and their cooperating witnesses make use of essentially the same conversational strategies.

This book offers a distinctly sociolinguistic perspective on the nature of language in digital technologies. It starts by bringing new media sociolinguistics up to date, addressing technologies like instant messaging, text messaging, blogging, photo-sharing, mobile phones, gaming, social network sites, and video sharing. Chapters cover a range of communicative contexts (journalism, tourism, leisure, performance, public debate), communicators (professional and lay, young people and adults, intimates, and groups), and languages (Irish, Hebrew, Chinese, Finnish, Japanese, German, Greek, Arabic, French, and English). The volume is organized around topics of primary interest to sociolinguists and discourse analysts, including genre, style, stance, language ideology, and multimodality.

The book provides an accessible state-of-the-art discussion of current trends in the theory, method and tools for the language-focused analysis of text and discourse. The exposition is combined with close analyses of a wide range of texts, e.g. narrative and non-narrative, spoken and written, from a variety of communication contexts and discourse types. The presentation is based on the fundamental distinction of two discourse modes, namely the narrative and non-narrative modes. The book is suitable for students and teachers of linguistics, including discourse analysis, textlinguistics, pragmatics and sociolinguistics, as well as for students across humanities and social science disciplines with an interest in the linguistic methods of discourse analysis. It includes guided activities for self-study or use in a classroom and suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter.