The act of questioning is the primary speech interaction between an institutional speaker and someone outside the institution. These roles dictate their language practices. "Why Do You Ask?" is the first collected volume to focus solely on the question/answer process, drawing on a range of methodological approaches like Conversational Analysis, Discourse Analysis, Discursive Psychology, and Sociolinguistics-and using as data not just medical, legal, and educational environments, but also less-studied institutions like telephone call centers, broadcast journalism (i.e. talk show interviews), academia, and telemarketing. An international roster of well-known contributors addresses such issues as: the relationship between the syntax of the question and its discourse function; the kind of institutional work that questions perform; the degree to which the questioner can control the direction of the conversation; and how questions are used to repackage responses, to construct meaning, and to serve the institutional goals of speakers. Why Do You Ask? will appeal to linguists and others interested in institutional discourse, as well as those interested in the grammatical/pragmatic nature of questions.

Product Description: This landmark four-volume collection traces the development of language and gender from its original associations with second-wave feminism to its more recent alignment with postmodern approaches to feminism. Language and Gender is fully indexed and has a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which highlights key themes that have persisted across different historical periods and places the collected material in its intellectual context...read more

Product Description: Representing Rape is the first feminist analysis of the language of sexual assault trials from the perspective of linguists. Susan Ehrlich argues that language is central to all legal settings - specifically sexual harassment and acquaintance rape hearings where linguistic descriptions of the events are often the only type of evidence available...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Modern literary narratives, like modern paintings, are often represented from different viewing positions. In the case of a painting, the differing viewpoints will vary in terms of spatial position. In the case of a narrative it is possible for the various viewpoints to differ both spatially and temporally. In fact, some narratives are characterized by frequent shifts in the spatial and temporal positions from which events and descriptions are related, with certain events described simultaneously from more than one temporal and/or spatial position. The texts investigated in this study are narratives of this type, written in the literary style known as free, indirect style. The book's purpose is two-fold. From the perspective of linguistics, it seeks to analyze the discourse structure of texts with a complex temporal organization. From the perspective of literary studies, it seeks to explain certain non-linguistic aspects of the texts in terms of linguistic form. This book then, extends the domain of discourse analysis to include the language of complex literary texts and, at the same time, offers a linguistically adequate account of the relationship between linguistic form and point of view.