Lesley Jeffries

Dan McIntyre

Matt Evans

Hazel Price

Erica Gold

What's the word that describes the process of making supportive noises when you're listening to someone? What is syntax and how does it differ from grammar? Do you know what a morpheme is? And did you know that it's not only an atom that has a nucleus? The Babel Lexicon of Language is an entertaining and accessible introduction to the key terminology involved in the study of language. It defines over 500 terms and uses contemporary language examples, explaining complex issues in an easy-to-understand way. Written by the expert editorial team behind Babel, the popular language magazine, and assuming no prior knowledge of linguistics, The Babel Lexicon of Language is an invaluable resource for students, teachers and anyone with an interest in language.

The Babel Lexicon of Language

An engaging and accessible A-Z of linguistics from the expert team behind Babel: The Language Magazine.

Ideal for those who are starting a degree in English Language or Linguistics, this textbook covers all the basic knowledge and tools of analysis students need for studying language. It introduces methods of English language description and enables readers to learn about the smallest units of language (sounds) and work through the subsequent levels (morphology and syntax) until the sentence is reached. The book also contains a chapter on basic lexical semantics. The final chapter in the book introduces readers to text structure, discourse and linguistic theory. This book is core reading for students taking introductory modules as part of an English Language or Linguistics degree. It will act as a foundation for more advanced work further into the curriculum.

The Structure of Modern English

Discovering Language

Brian Walker

Building on Raymond Williams' iconic "Keywords" released in 1975, Jeffries and Walker show how some pivotal words significantly increased in use and evolved in meaning during the years of the 'New Labour' project. Focussing on print news media, this book establishes a set of socio-political keywords for the 'Blair Years', and demonstrates how their evolving meanings are indicative of the ideological landscape in Britain at that time, and the extent to which the cultural hegemony of the New Labour project influenced the language of the commentariat. Combining corpus linguistic approaches with critical stylistics the authors conduct an analysis of two newspaper corpora using computational tools. Looking closely at textually-constructed meanings within the data, their investigation of the keywords has a qualitative focus, and sets out a clear methodology for combining corpus approaches with systematic co-textual analysis.

Keywords in the Press: The New Labour Years

Daniel McIntyre

An introduction to the study of style in language, offering practical advice on how to stylistically analyse texts.

Stylistics

Matthew Evans

Jim O'Driscoll

The Routledge Handbook of Language in Conflict presents a range of linguistic approaches as a means for examining the nature of communication related to conflict. Divided into four sections, the Handbook critically examines text, interaction, languages and applications of linguistics in situations of conflict. Spanning 30 chapters by a variety of international scholars, this Handbook: includes real-life case studies of conflict and covers conflicts from a wide range of geographical locations at every scale of involvement (from the personal to the international), of every timespan (from the fleeting to the decades-long) and of varying levels of intensity (from the barely articulated to the overtly hostile) sets out the textual and interactional ways in which conflict is engendered and in which people and groups of people can be set against each other considers what linguistic research has brought, and can bring, to the universal aim of minimising the negative effects of outbreaks of conflict wherever and whenever they occur. The Routledge Handbook of Language in Conflict is an essential reference book for students and researchers of language and communication, linguistics, peace studies, international relations and conflict studies.

The Routledge Handbook of Language in Conflict

In this important book, Lesley Jeffries introduces a phenomenon which has not been given the attention it deserves - the contextual construction of oppositional meaning. These are opposites not recognisable as such out of context but that are clearly set up this way in the text concerned. The significance of oppositional meaning is well-known, and has been discussed by scholars for millennia, from Philosophy to Politics. But the main emphasis has always been on the conventional opposite: the opposite recognised by lexical semantics. Starting from socio-cultural viewpoints, moving to original research and then concluding with a new theoretical formulation, this book introduces and consolidates a significant new approach to the analysis of oppositional meaning. It closes with a discussion of the importance of constructed opposition in hegemonic practice and makes a case for the inclusion of opposition as a central tool of critical discourse analysis. It is now essential reading for researchers and graduates in stylistics, linguistics and language studies.

The Construction of Oppositional Meaning

Opposition In Discourse

This introduction to semantics and the nature of language aims to guide the student and non-specialist through the major ways in which the English language makes meaning. The author discusses the meaning of linguistic units at all levels of language, from sound to discourse, while studying also the role of theories and models themselves in understanding human linguistic behavior. Readers are encouraged to think through and evaluate complex ideas and theories for themselves.

An Introduction to Language Study

Meaning in English

Poetics and Linguistics Association. Conference

Derek Bousfield

This volume of articles comprises papers from the 25th annual conference of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA), which was held at the University of Huddersfield, England, in July 2005. The theme of the conference was 'Stylistics and Social Cognition', and as usual at a PALA conference, this theme was interpreted very widely by the participants, as the reader of this book will no doubt conclude.At the heart of this volume, there is something of a reaction against the cognitive developments in stylistics, which might be seen as being in danger of privileging the individual interpretation of literature over something more social. The concern is to consider whether there is a more collective approach that could be taken to the meaning of text, and whether recent insights from cognitive stylistics could work with this idea of collectivity to define something we might call 'commonality' of meaning in texts.Stylistics and Social Cognition will be of interest to those working in stylistics and other text-analytic fields such as critical discourse analysis and those concerned with notions of interpretation, collective meaning and human communication.

Stylistics and Social Cognition

Discovering language provides students with the basic knowledge they need for advanced study. Organized thematically, it can be used as a course text or help with specific aspects of language. Each section includes an introduction, worked examples, 'in context' sections relating the topic to real examples and suggestions for further reading.

In this important book, Lesley Jeffries introduces a phenomenon which has not been given the attention it deserves - the contextual construction of oppositional meaning. These are opposites not recognisable as such out of context but that are clearly set up this way in the text concerned. The significance of oppositional meaning is well-known but the main emphasis has always been on the conventional opposite: the opposite recognised by lexical semantics. Starting from socio-cultural viewpoints, moving to original research and then concluding with a new theoretical formulation, this book introduces and consolidates a significant new approach to the analysis of oppositional meaning. It closes with a discussion of the importance of constructed opposition in hegemonic practice and makes a case for the inclusion of opposition as a central tool of critical discourse analysis. It is essential reading for those in stylistics, linguistics and language studies.

We tend to think that politicians, copywriters and journalists can affect us by their use of language, but how does this happen, exactly? Critical Discourse Analysis provides us with general theories for explaining the impact texts can have, considering the social and political contexts in which texts are produced and read. Stylistics provides detailed tools of analysis for understanding how texts work. Critical Stylistics combines the strengths of these two approaches to uncover the deep-seated ideologies of everyday texts. Original and engaging, Critical Stylistics: • presents a new amalgamation of stylistics, critical discourse analysis and functional approaches to grammar • introduces a comprehensive set of tools to help explain and analyse the power of written texts • examines a wide variety of real texts and provides a wealth of practical worked examples

Lesley Jeffries

Books

Your next favorite book is out there