An introduction to linguistics

Edited by Susan Behrens, Judith Parker

Language in the Real World challenges traditional approaches to linguistics to provide an innovative introduction to the subject. By first examining the real world applications of core areas of linguistics and then addressing the theory behind these applications, this text offers an inductive, illustrative, and interactive overview for students. Key areas covered include animal communication, phonology, language variation, gender and power, lexicography, translation, forensic linguistics, language acquisition, ASL, and language disorders. Each chapter, written by an expert in the field, is introduced by boxed notes listing the key points covered and features an author’s note to readers that situates the chapter in its real world context. Activities and pointers for further study and reading are also integrated into the chapters and an end of text glossary is provided to aid study.

Professors and students will benefit from the interactive companion website that includes a student section featuring comments and hints on the chapter exercises within the book, a series of flash cards to test knowledge and further reading and links to key resources. Material for professors includes essay and multiple choice questions based on each chapter and additional general discussion topics.

Language in the Real World shows that linguistics can be appreciated, studied, and enjoyed by actively engaging real world applications of linguistic knowledge and principles and will be essential reading for students with an interest in language.

ISBN: 9780415774673

Published March 15 2010 by Routledge.

Current Conversations and Contemporary Challenges

Edited by MARK J. PORROVECCHIO

Reengaging the Prospects of Rhetoric reanimates the debate over the function and scope of rhetoric. Providing a contemporary response to the volume The Prospect of Rhetoric (1971), this volume reconceptualizes that classic work to address the challenges facing the study of rhetoric today.

With contributions from today’s leading rhetorical scholars, Reengaging offers "response" essays to each chapter of the original work. Each scholar uses his/her essay as a forum in which to address three questions:

• As a historical document, why is this essay important?
• In terms of contemporary theory and/or practice, what is the significance of the essay?
• How can the issues raised therein be profitably addressed in the future?

These provocative engagements suggest that, while the study of rhetoric has gained much ground in the intervening decades, there is more work to be done to reestablish the primacy of rhetoric in contemporary society.

This volume provides students and scholars of rhetoric with a strong foundation in the issues that have shaped contemporary rhetorical theory and criticism. It offers them an accessible introduction to the challenges facing future iterations of rhetorical theory and criticism. As a standalone text or a supplemental resource for undergraduate and graduate courses in the history, theory, and criticism of rhetoric or contemporary rhetorical theory, it will help to shape rhetoric’s future role in communication studies and will foster interdisciplinary dialogues about the topic.

ISBN: 9780415873086

Published February 12 2010 by Routledge.

Influences, Impacts, and Innovations

By Shay Sayre, Cynthia King

The second edition of this innovative textbook introduces students to the ways that society shapes our many forms of entertainment and in turn, how entertainment shapes society. Entertainment and Society examines a broad range of types of entertainment that we enjoy in our daily lives—covering new areas like sports, video games, gambling, theme parks, travel, and shopping, as well as traditional entertainment media such as film, television, and print. A primary emphasis is placed on the impact of technological and cultural convergence on innovation and the influence of contemporary entertainment. The authors begin with a general overview of the study of entertainment, introducing readers to various ways of understanding leisure and play, and then go on to trace a brief history of the development of entertainment from its live forms through mediated technology. Subsequent chapters review a broad range of theories and research and provide focused discussions of the relationship between entertainment and key societal factors including economics and commerce, culture, law, politics, ethics, advocacy and technology. The authors conclude by highlighting innovations and emerging trends in live and mediated entertainment and exploring their implications for the future.

The new edition features updated examples and pedagogical features throughout including text boxes, case studies, student activities, questions for discussion, and suggestions for further reading.

ISBN: 9780415998062

Published January 29 2010 by Routledge.

Copyright Law and the Regulation of Digital Culture

By Jessica Reyman

In recent years we have witnessed a rising tension between the open architecture of the Internet and legal restrictions for online activities. The impact of digital recording technologies and distributed file sharing systems has forever changed the expectations of everyday users with regard to digital information. At the same time, however, U.S. Copyright Law has shown a decided trend toward more restrictions over what we are able to do with digital materials. As a result, a gap has emerged between the reality of copyright law and the social reality of our everyday activities. Through an analysis of the competing rhetorical frameworks about copyright regulation in a digital age, this book shows how the stories told by active parties in the debate shape our cultural understanding of what is and is not acceptable in the use of copyrighted works on digital networks. Reyman posits recent legal developments as sites of conflict between competing value systems in our culture: one of control, relying heavily on comparisons of intellectual property to physical property, and emphasizing ownership, theft, and piracy, and the other a value of community, implementing new concepts such as that of an intellectual "commons," and emphasizing exchange, collaboration, and responsibility to a public good. Reyman argues that the rhetoric of the digital copyright debate, namely the rhetorical positioning of technology as destructive to creative and intellectual production, has profound implications for the future of digital culture.

ISBN: 9780415999076

Published December 08 2009 by Routledge.

Tragedy, Normativity, and Futurity

By Dustin Bradley Goltz

Through the analysis of over seventy films and thirty television series, ranging from Shortbus, Sweet Home Alabama, and Poseidon to Noah’s Arc, Brothers & Sisters, and Dawson’s Creek, Goltz examines reoccurring narrative structures in popular media that perpetuate the extreme value placed upon "young" gay male bodies, while devaluing health, aging, and longevity. Alienated from the future -- outside of limited and exclusionary systems of marriage and procreation -- the gay male is narrated within a circular tragedy that draws upon cultural mythologies of "older" gay male predation, the absence of gay intergenerational mentorship, and the gay male as sacrificial victim. Using a Burkean framework, Goltz makes a theoretical, rhetorical, and cultural investigation of how the increased visibility of "positive" gay representation in dominant media shapes contemporary meanings of gay aging, heteronormative future, homonormative future, and queer potential.

ISBN: 9780415872287

Published November 04 2009 by Routledge.

Edited by Louise Cummings

Pragmatics has grown considerably in its relatively short history, from its original disciplinary influences in philosophy and linguistics, into a multidisciplinary field that encompasses a range of theoretical and empirical concerns. The Routledge Pragmatics Encyclopedia captures the diversity of these intellectual interests in a comprehensive, single-volume edition.

The Routledge Pragmatics Encyclopedia covers concepts and theories that have traditionally been associated with pragmatics, but also recent areas of development within the field, scholars who have had a significant influence on pragmatics, interdisciplinary exchanges between pragmatics and other areas of enquiry and all major research trends. Extensive cross-references between entries, along with suggestions for further reading at the end of entries, ensure that the interested reader can pursue additional study of chosen topics.

With over 200 entries, written by leading academics from around the world, The Routledge Pragmatics Encyclopedia captures the rich complexity of pragmatics in an accessible manner. This reference will be relevant to students of pragmatics as well as to established scholars in the field.

ISBN: 9780415430968

Published October 23 2009 by Routledge.

Thinking About Media and Thinking About Thinking

By Bernard McGrane, John Gunderson

"McGrane and Gunderson have put together an extraordinarily provocative stream of sociologically inspired responses to television. Nothing could be more "relevant" to students, and in the right hands, this is a resource for a learning experience that at once maximizes critical and creative thinking. McGrane and Gunderson give new life to sociological thinking."—Jack Katz, Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles

This book was created over years of discussion, classroom experiments, exercises and interaction. This book is also the process and product of the interaction of two individuals working with ideas. Its creation is the antithesis of what we are critiquing. It is the result of a dialogue and human relationship. This book addresses a very different relationship, a "relationship" to television….a "televisionship," a one dimensional imprinting relationship without dialogue or living human interaction. It examines a relationship with Plato’s "cave" and the contemporary media matrix that continues its existence.

ISBN: 9780415994866

Published October 21 2009 by Routledge.

Edited by Stuart Allan

The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism presents an authoritative, comprehensive assessment of diverse forms of news media reporting – past, present and future.

Including 56 chapters, written by an outstanding team of internationally respected authors, the book provides scholars and students with a reliable, historically informed guide to news media and journalism studies.

This companion has the following features:

• It is organised to address a series of themes pertinent to the on-going theoretical and methodological development of news and journalism studies around the globe.
• The focus encompasses news institutions, production processes, texts, and audiences.
• Individual chapters are problem-led, seeking to address ‘real world’ concerns that cast light on an important dimension of news and journalism – and show why it matters.
• Chapters draw on a range of academic disciplines to explore pertinent topics, particularly around the role of journalism in democracy, such as citizenship, power and public trust.
• Discussion revolves primarily around academic research conducted in the UK and the US, with further contributions from other national contexts - thereby allowing international comparisons to be made.

The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism provides an essential guide to key ideas, issues, concepts and debates, whilst also stressing the value of reinvigorating scholarship with a critical eye to developments in the professional realm.

ISBN: 9780415465298

Published October 20 2009 by Routledge.

Edited by Albert Moran, Michael Keane

Cultural borrowing is exploding across the world. Creative ideas are transferred and modified in ever increasing number and complexity making new products ranging from TV shows to architectural style in new cities. But what do we really know about the spread of creative ideas? This intriguing, engrossing, and comprehensive collection looks at the cultural and commercial dimensions of creative borrowing world wide with an international cast of contributors and case studies from India to Ireland, Canada to China.

Cultural Adaptation explores how creative ideas are packaged and nationalised to meet local taste, maps the cultural economy of adaptation in entertainment media ranging from motion pictures to mobile phones, and even probes the role of cultural recipes and formats in mutating participatory experiences of theme parks and sporting spectacles. Written in a lively and accessible manner, the book also provides insight into remaking in lifestyle and consumption cultures including fashion, food, drink, and gambling. Essential for communication, cultural, media, leisure and consumption studies scholars and students alike, this book opens up important new perspectives on how we understand global creativity.

This book was published as a special issue of Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies.

ISBN: 9780415543439

Published October 16 2009 by Routledge.

Edited by CHARLES BAZERMAN, Robert Krut, KAREN LUNSFORD, Susan McLeod, Suzie Null, Paul Rogers, Amanda Stansell

Traditions of Writing Research reflects the different styles of work offered at the Writing Research Across Borders conference. Organized by Charles Bazerman, one of the pre-eminent scholars in writing studies, the conference facilitated an unprecedented gathering of writing researchers. Representing the best of the works presented, this collection focuses solely on writing research, in its lifespan scope bringing together writing researchers interested in early childhood through adult writing practices. It brings together differing research traditions, and offers a broad international scope, with contributor-presenters including top international researchers in the field

The volume's opening section presents writing research agendas from different regions and research groups. The next section addresses the national, political, and historical contexts that shape educational institutions and the writing initiatives developed there. The following sections represent a wide range of research approaches for investigating writing processes and practices in primary, secondary, and higher education. The volume ends with theoretical and methodological reflections.

This exemplary collection, like the conference that it grew out of, will bring new perspectives to the rich dialogue of contemporary research on writing and advance understanding of this complex and important human activity.

ISBN: 9780415993371

Published October 06 2009 by Routledge.