Linguistic Theory and Practice

An introduction to theoretical and methodological issues in the study of language and social life. We begin by examining semiotic approaches to language. We turn to classical research on language as a structured system - covering such topics as phonology and grammatical categories - but we focus on the implications of such work for broader social scientific and humanistic research. We then consider areas of active contemporary research, including cognition and linguistic relativity, meaning and semantics, pronouns and deixis, deference and register, speech acts and performativity, interaction, verbal art and poetics, reported speech, performance, and linguistic ideology.