Linguistics Across Cultures

This volume seeks to answers such questions as: how is conscious experience translated into discourse? How are foregrounding and backgrounding accomplished? What is the function of features like lexical choice and referential choice? And many more.

A new, alternative, integrated approach to the developmental study of language and culture.

Communication Across Cultures remains an excellent resource for students of linguistics and related disciplines, including anthropology, sociology and education. It is also a valuable resource for professionals concerned with language and intercultural communication in this global era.

This edited volume brings together original sociolinguistic and cultural contributions on food as an instrument to explore diasporic identities. Focusing on food practices in cross-cultural contact, the authors reveal how they can be used as a powerful vehicle for positive intercultural exchange either though conservation and the maintenance of cultural continuity, or through hybridization and the means through which migrant communities find compromise, or even consent, within the host community. Each chapter presents a fascinating range of data and new perspectives on cultures and languages in contact: from English (and some of its varieties) to Italian, German, Spanish, and to Japanese and Palauan, as well as an exemplary range of types of contact, in colonial, multicultural, and diasporic situations. The authors use a range of integrated approaches to examine how socio-linguistic food practices can, and do, contribute to identity construction in diverse transnational and diasporic contexts. The book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of translation, semiotics, cultural studies and sociolinguistics.

What does 'autonomy' mean within language learning? Should it be enhanced within national, institutional or small group culture and, if so, how can that be done? A variety of new theoretical perspectives are here firmly anchored in research data from projects worldwide. By foregrounding cultural issues and thus explicitly addressing the concerns of many educators on the appropriateness and feasibility of developing learner autonomy in practice, this book fills a gap in the literature and offers practical benefits to language teachers.

Food and Language: Discourses and Foodways across Cultures explores in innovative ways how food and language are intertwined across cultures and social settings. How do we talk about food? How do we interact in its presence? How do we use food to communicate? And how does social interaction feed us? The book assumes no previous linguistic or anthropological knowledge but provides readers with the understanding to pursue further research on the subject. With a full glossary at the end of the book and additional tools hosted on an eResources page (such as recommended web and video links and some suggested research exercises), this book serves as an ideal introduction for courses on food, language, and food-and-language in anthropology departments, linguistics departments, and across the humanities and social sciences. It will also appeal to any reader interested in the semiotic interplay between food and language.