Product Description: A concise, accessible introduction to the great linguist who shaped the study of language for the 20th century, Saussure for Beginners puts the challenging ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) into clear and illuminating terms, focusing on the unifying principles of his teachings and showing how his thoughts on linguistics migrated to anthropology...read more

Product Description: While there have been occasional Systemic Functional treatments of Japanese before, this is the first volume dedicated to Japanese from a Systemic Functional perspective. This book is divided into descriptions and applications. The descriptions are further divided into the three metafunctions: textual, interpersonal and ideational...read more

Product Description: M. A. K. Halliday is widely regarded as the father of Systemic Functional Linguistics, as well as having contributed important work to fields such as sociolinguistics and language acquisition. This overview will enable readers to understand and appreciate the significance of Halliday's work...read more

Product Description: Table of Contents: Volume One Part One: The Beginnings 1. M.A.K. Halliday: The Early Years 1925-70 (Jonathan Webster, City University of Hong Kong); 2. The Development of Systemic-Functional Linguistics in China (Huang Guowen, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China); 3...read more

Product Description: This book provides a broad overview of parameter-setting theory in first and second language acquisition and refines the theory by revisiting and challenging the traditional assumptions that underlie it, based on cross-linguistic language data that cover a range of syntactic and phonological phenomena...read more

Product Description: Analysing Casual Conversation, first published in 1997 by Cassell, develops a systematic model for the analysis and description of casual conversation in English. Working through authentic examples of casual conversations involving participants differing in age, gender, ethnicity and socio-economic class, the authors argue that despite its sometimes aimless appearance and apparently unstructured content, casual conversation is a highly structured activity and plays a critical role in the social construction of reality...read more

Product Description: New edition of a best-selling introduction to systemic functional linguistics explores the social semiotic approach to language most closely associated with the work of Michael Halliday and his colleagues. An approach which views language as a strategic, meaning-making resource, systemic linguistics focuses on the analysis of authentic, everyday texts, and asks both how people use language to make meanings, and how language itself is organised to enable those meanings to be made...read more

Product Description: This book examines mathematical discourse from the perspective of Michael Halliday's social semiotic theory. In this approach, mathematics is conceptualized as a multisemiotic discourse involving language, visual images and symbolism...read more

Product Description: The present volume, originally prepared to celebrate Jan Firbas' 80th birthday, unfortunately is presented only belatedly, to commemorate one of the most outstanding personalities of functional and structural linguistics. Its contributors have been inspired by the richness and penetrating invention of Firbas, contained in his analysis of functional sentence perspective and of many other aspects of sentence and discourse...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This book describes and evaluates alternative approaches within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to representing the structure of language at the level of form. It assumes no prior knowledge of SFL, and can therefore be read as an introduction to current issues within the theory...read more

Product Description: This book investigates the nature of human language and its importance for the study of the mind. It asks what language is from a biological point of view and what the relative contribution of nature and nurture is when a child learns his or her language...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: William Croft's text weaves together recent research findings from sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, grammatical change, pragmatics, social variation, language contact and genetic linguistics.

Product Description: How do our brains enable us to speak creatively and build up an understanding of language? This accessible book examines the linguistic and neuro-anatomical underpinnings of language and considers how language skills can systematically break down in individuals with different types of brain damage...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

The brain is the organ of knowledge and organizer of our abilities, our means of recognizing a face in a crowd, of conversing about anything we experience or imagine, of forming thoughts and developing ideas, of instantly understanding words coming rapidly in conversation. How does it manage all this? Does it represent information in symbols or in the connectivity of a vast network?Pathways of the Brain builds a theory to answer such questions. Using a top-down modeling strategy, it charts relationships among words and other products of the brain’s linguistic system to reveal properties of that system. Going beyond earlier linguistics, it sets three plausibility requirements for a valid neurocognitive theory: operational, developmental, and neurological: It must show how the linguistic system can operate for speaking and understanding, how it can be learned by children, and how it is implemented in neural structures. Unlike theories that leave linguistics isolated from science, it builds a bridge to biology.Of interest to anthropologists, linguists, neurologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, psychologists, and any thoughtful person interested in language or the brain.The author is Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Cognitive Sciences. (view table of contents)

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'This interdisciplinary collection of articles focuses on pictorial and iconic systems of the Maya, Mixtec, Aztec, and Inca, and the social contexts of writing during the colonial period, to challenge western conceptualizations of art, writing and literacy. The final papers offer stimulating discussions of interactions between European and indigenous writing systems'--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57.http://www.loc.gov/hlas/

'This interdisciplinary collection of articles focuses on pictorial and iconic systems of the Maya, Mixtec, Aztec, and Inca, and the social contexts of writing during the colonial period, to challenge western conceptualizations of art, writing and literacy. The final papers offer stimulating discussions of interactions between European and indigenous writing systems'--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57.http://www.loc.gov/hlas/