It is surprising how much of everyday conversation consists of repetitive expressions such as 'thank you', 'sorry', would you mind?' and their many variants. However commonplace they may be, they do have important functions in communication. This thorough study draws upon original data from the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English to provide a discoursal and pragmatic account of the more common expressions found in conversational routines, such as apologising, thanking, requesting and offering. The routines studied in this book range from conventionalized or idiomatized phrases to those which can be generated by grammar. Examples have been taken from face-to-face conversations, radio discussions and telephone conversations, and transcription has been based upon the prosodic system of Crystal (1989). An extensive introduction provides the theory and methodology for the book and discusses the criteria for fixedness, grammatical analysis, and pragmatic functions of conversational routines which are later applied to the phrases. Following chapters deal specifically with phrases for thanking, apologising, indirect requests, and discourse-organising markers for conversational routines, on the basis of empirical investigation of the data from the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English.

This collection of essays addresses the notion of 'conversational routine', and explores the characteristics of some of the more prepatterned, formulaic, and conventionalized aspects of conversational activity from a variety of perspectives. In his preface, Coulmas claims conversational interaction has its own rules, different from a linguist's notion of 'rule', and that 'conversational rules and routines purport to structure and make possible both the predictable and the non-predictable aspects of conversation' (p. x). Hence the importance of this relatively unexplored side of conversational patterning. Of the thirteen papers included here, three have been previously published in academic journals; the rest are new. Half the authors are European, half are North American; and their disciplines range through linguistics, English, educational linguistics, language teaching, sociology, and psycholinguistics. -- From http://www.jstor.org (Feb. 13, 2015).

Conversing with others has given insights to different perspectives, helped build ideas, and solve problems. Academic conversations push students to think and learn in lasting ways. Academic conversations are back-and-forth dialogues in which students focus on a topic and explore it by building, challenging, and negotiating relevant ideas. In Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings authors Jeff Zwiers and Marie Crawford address the challenges teachers face when trying to bring thoughtful, respectful, and focused conversations into the classroom. They identify five core communications skills needed to help students hold productive academic conversation across content areas: Elaborating and Clarifying Supporting Ideas with Evidence Building On and/or Challenging Ideas Paraphrasing Synthesizing This book shows teachers how to weave the cultivation of academic conversation skills and conversations into current teaching approaches. More specifically, it describes how to use conversations to build the following: Academic vocabulary and grammar Critical thinking skills such as persuasion, interpretation, consideration of multiple perspectives, evaluation, and application Literacy skills such as questioning, predicting, connecting to prior knowledge, and summarizing An academic classroom environment brimming with respect for others' ideas, equity of voice, engagement, and mutual support The ideas in this book stem from many hours of classroom practice, research, and video analysis across grade levels and content areas. Readers will find numerous practical activities for working on each conversation skill, crafting conversation-worthy tasks, and using conversations to teach and assess. Academic Conversations offers an in-depth approach to helping students develop into the future parents, teachers, and leaders who will collaborate to build a better world.

These volumes contain selected papers from the Second International Conference on Contrastive Semantics and Pragmatics that was held at Newnham College, University of Cambridge, in September 2000. They include papers on negation, temporality, modality, evidentiality, eventualities, grammar and conceptualization, grammaticalization, metaphor, cross-cultural pragmatics and speech acts and the semantics-pragmatics boundary. There are contributions by, amongst many others, Les Bruce, Ilinca Crainiceanu, Thorstein Fretheim, Saeko Fukushima, Ronald Geluykens, Javier Gutierrez-Rexach, Klaus von Heusinger, K. M. Jaszczolt, Susumu Kubo, Akiko Kurosawa, Eva Lavric, Didier Maillat, Marta Maleczki, Steve Nicolle, Sergei Tatevosov, L. M. Tovena, Jacqueline Visconti and Krista Vogelberg.

The existence of formulaic patterns has been attested to all languages of the world. However, systematic research in this field has been focused on only a few European standard languages with a rich literary tradition and a high degree of written norm. It was on the basis of these data that the theoretical framework and methodological approaches were developed. The volume shifts this focus by centering the investigation on new data, including data from lesser-used languages and dialects, extra-european languages, linguistic varieties mostly used in spoken domains as well as at previous historical stages of language development. Their inclusion challenges the existing postulates at both a theoretical and methodological level. Areas of interest include the following questions: What is formulaic in these types of languages, varieties and dialects? Are the criteria developed within the framework of phraseological research applicable to new data? Can any specific types of formulaic patterns and/or any specific features of regular (already known) types of formulaic patterns be observed and how do they emerge? What methodological difficulties need to be overcome when dealing with new data?

This volume contains a contemporary, integrated description of the processes of language. These range from fast scales (fractions of a second) to slow ones (over a million years). The contributors, all experts in their fields, address language in the brain, production of sentences and dialogues, language learning, transmission and evolutionary processes that happen over centuries or millenia, the relation between language and genes, the origins of language, self-organization, and language competition and death. The book as a whole will help to show how processes at different scales affect each other, thus presenting language as a dynamic, complex and profoundly human phenomenon.

For use in courses on language teaching methodology and teacher preparation, this book also serves as an invaluable source for courses in language curriculum development, materials development, and teaching practice. The author views effective language teaching as a network of interactions involving the curriculum, methodology, the teacher, the learner, and instructional materials (hence the metaphor of a matrix). Each chapter discusses and examines the theoretical and practical dimensions of a central issue in language teaching. Among the topics covered are curriculum development, designing instructional materials, teaching listening, speaking, reading and writing, the nature of effective teaching, self-monitoring in teacher development, and language and content. Richards presents key issues in an accessible and highly readable style, and shows how teachers and teachers-in-training can be involved in the investigation of classroom teaching and learning. The emphasis is not on prescriptions but rather on developing effective teaching through understanding the various factors that interact in second language learning and in the second language classroom.