The segment is an elusive entity. On the one hand it appears so intuitively obvious that it might appear strange to some that it warrants the attention of an entire volume, yet on the other hand it is not at all clear what it is, where it comes from, or whether or not the concept is entirely chimerical and thus a hindrance in our attempts to understand human language. This volume takes a de…
This book offers a critical examination of the standard description of tense and aspect in Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and suggests a new approach to these categories within a systemic functional framework. While SFL is developing very rapidly in its applications and in a number of theoretical derivations, many of Halliday’s basic assumptions, as well as many of hi…
What is a collocation? Collocation means a natural combination of words; it refers to the way English words are closely associated with each other. For example, pay and attention go together, as do commit and crime; blond goes with hair and heavy with rain. Why learn collocations?
This is not a book about me. But since this is a book about ego, I’m going to address a question that I’d be a hypocrite not to have thought about. Who the hell am I to write it?
Clear and concise, this textbook is an introduction to phonology forstudents which assumes no prior knowledge of this area of linguistics and provides an overall view of the field which can be covered within one year. The book does not confine itself to any specific theoretical approach and can therefore be used for study within any framework and also to prepare students for work in more sp…
We hope, through this Handbook, to offer a comprehensive sense of the scope and possibilities of discourse analysis, like the gift of multiple meanings. We know that some will see areas of meaning we have omitted, pathways we could have walked down but, due to the usual vagaries of human fallibility, we either did not pursue or were not able to realize. This is the curse of discourse: the d…
In this chapter we explore a system for thinking about, and then describing, English speech sounds. We will see that there are important differences between the usual written system of English and how the system of sounds is structured – so many differences, in fact, that the familiar written system of English could never be used as a transcription of either the structure that lies behind spe…
Texts and Practices provides an essential introduction to the theory and practice of Critical Discourse Analysis. Using insights from this challenging new method of linguistic analysis, the contributors to this collection reveal the ways in which language can be used as a means of social control. The essays in Texts and Practices: • Demonstrate how Critical Discourse Analysis can be app…
Discourse is one of the most significant concepts of contemporary thinking in the humanities and social sciences as it concerns the ways language mediates and shapes our interactions with each other and with the social, political and cultural formations of our society. The Bloomsbury Discourse Series aims to capture the fast-developing interest in discourse to provide students, new and experien…
This textbook provides a concise, clear and accessible introduction to current syntactic theory, drawing on the key concepts of Chomsky’s Minimalist Program. Assuming little or no prior grammatical knowledge, Andrew Radford takes students through a wide range of topics in English syntax, beginning at an elementary level and progressing in stages towards more advanced material. There is an ext…