2016 collection (147 titles)

This book is intended to address students, researchers and teachers of spoken language. It presents an empirical study of task-oriented language data in which coparticipants display levels of recipiency through reactive tokens. An in-depth investigation of displaying recipiency is of interest primarily to conversation analysts and pragmaticians involved in the research on talk-in-interaction in general and Mandarin Chinese conversations in particular. The communicative aspect makes this book relevant to the areas of language use. While previous research has shown that one single reactive token has different discourse functions in different conversational environments, this study shows that participants’ collaborative orientation to each other’s status of displayed recipiency seems decisive for the selection of reactive tokens, rather than one specific reactive token being employed for specific conversational purposes in varying interactional contexts. This book also contributes to fields in linguistics, pragmatics, and sociology which specialize in the investigation of spontaneous human communication.

This edited volume brings together the work of a number of researchers working in the framework of Processability Theory (PT), a psycholinguistic theory of second language acquisition (SLA) (Pienemann 1998; 2005). The aim of the volume is two-fold: It engages with current issues in both theory development and theory application and focuses on theoretical developments within the framework of PT as well as issues related to second language teaching and assessment. In coordinating approaches to addressing both theoretical and applied aspects of SLA, this volume aims at bridging the gap between theory and practice. It also reflects the richness of debate within the field of PT-based research. The volume is intended for postgraduate students, SLA researchers as well as language teachers.

As of January 2019, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.

This volume examines the language of microblogs drawing on the example of a group of eleven users who are united by their interest in ballet as a physical activity and an art form. The book reports on a three and a half year study which complemented a 20,000 word corpus of tweets with semi-structured interviews and participant observation. It deals with two main questions: how users exploit the linguistic resources at their disposal to build a certain identity, and how the community boundaries are performed discursively. The focus is on the speech acts of self-praise and complaint, and on the storytelling practices of microbloggers. The comprehensive treatment of the speech act theory and the social psychological approaches to self-disclosure provides a stepping stone to the analysis of identity work, for which the users draw on two distinctive interpretive repertoires – affiliative and self-promoting.