Offers And Offer Refusals

This study offers a pragmatic dimension to World Englishes research. It is particularly timely because pragmatics has generally been understudied in past research on World Englishes, especially postcolonial Englishes. Apart from drawing attention to the paucity of research, the book also contributes to theory formation on the emerging theoretical framework, postcolonial pragmatics, which is then applied to data from two World (postcolonial) Englishes, Ghanaian and Cameroon Englishes. The copious examples used clearly illustrate how postcolonial societies realise various pragmatic phenomena, in this case offers and offer refusals, and how these could be fruitfully explained using an analytical framework designed on the complex internal set ups of these societies. For research on social interaction in these societies to be representative, it has to take into account the complex history of their evolution, contact with other systems during colonialism, and the heritages thereof. This book does just that.

Economic analysis rarely appears on the judicial horizon in intellectual property litigation. In competition cases, by contrast, economists are familiar figures in the courtroom and the language of economics is scattered throughout the judgments of even the highest courts. One might expect, therefore, that refusals to license intellectual property would generate the same fruitful symbiosis between law and economics when those refusals surface in competition proceedings. This however, has not been how the law on this subject has developed in most jurisdictions. Courts and enforcement agencies faced with a unilateral refusal to license have instead tended to retreat into sketchily articulated black letter rules and presumptions which then have to be fenced off from the rest of competition law by economically irrelevant qualifications and distinctions based on private law categorisations of, and rationales for, individual intellectual property rights. This bypassing of case-by-case analysis in favour of more traditional modes of legal reasoning is not entirely the fault of lawyers. Economists have contributed to this state of affairs by urging judges and regulators to convert empirically undernourished theories about the proper role of intellectual property in a market economy into rules of law and evidentiary presumptions intended to be binding in future cases. How this came about and what it means for the future of effective competition enforcement globally are the twin concerns of this book.

The challenges that EFL learners, teachers and teacher educators are facing today have increased considerably with the comparatively new role of English as the lingua franca of the modern world. For both learners and teachers, responding to these new demands involves mastering a broader set of communication skills and a wider range of competencies in English, L2 pragmatic competence being only one of them, albeit an extremely significant one. With this in mind, Politeness through the Prism of Requests, Apologies and Refusals explores various aspects of Serbian EFL learners’ (future EFL teachers’) pragmatic knowledge and metapragmatic awareness, both as elements of their communicative competence and as tools they can use to support their own students’ L2 pragmatic development. In addition to examining the language strategies they resort to in different communicative contexts and the reasoning behind their speech act strategy choice, this book also investigates the use of intonation to express and interpret pragmatic meanings. As one of the first steps towards assembling the complex jigsaw puzzle representing the pragmatic competence of Serbian learners of English, the book will be of considerable interest to researchers investigating aspects of L2 pragmatics in the speech of EFL learners, especially those with Slavic L1 backgrounds. Additionally, in offering an insight into the numerous challenges that future language professionals, including EFL teachers, face in the process of mastering L2 speech acts, the book will also be relevant to university EFL lecturers and teacher trainers.

This cutting-edge Handbook goes beyond discourses of equity, inclusion, and diversity, carving a space for critical discussions about the relationships between Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) and the university. In doing so, it forges new paths and alternative conceptual starting points to consider in making a commitment to social justice in higher education.

Language acquisition is a human endeavor par excellence. As children, all human beings learn to understand and speak at least one language: their mother tongue. It is a process that seems to take place without any obvious effort. Second language learning, particularly among adults, causes more difficulty. The purpose of this series is to compile a collection of high-quality monographs on language acquisition. The series serves the needs of everyone who wants to know more about the problem of language acquisition in general and/or about language acquisition in specific contexts.

Guest-edited by Jill Stoner and Ozayr Saloojee Over the past decade, and in a more concentrated form over the past two years, there has been increasing recognition of architecture’s systemic complicity in constructing and upholding hierarchies of race and class, and privileging colonial paradigms that perpetuate spatial and economic inequity. This AD issue reveals how designers, practitioners, scholars and architects are participating in dismantling the major canons of Western architecture. The work is both literal and figural: taking buildings apart and reconstituting them, and challenging mythologies that include drawing-as-analogue, building-as object, architect-as-hero and nature-as-other. Architecture has both potential and responsibility for political agency in the public realm. The contributions to this issue foreground emancipatory spatial ideas and practices from around the world, demonstrating that refusal is no longer just absence and denial, but a constructive mode of resistance and action that needs to be approached through subversive urban works, design pedagogy and alliances across multiple disciplines. Contributors: Piper Bernbaum, Carwil Bjork-James, Thiresh Govender, Lucia Jalón Oyarzun, Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers, Cong Chi Nguyen, Quilian Riano, Hannah Le Roux, Alberto de Salvatierra, Cathy Smith, Chat Travieso, and Ilze Wolff.