Using a novel model, this book investigates the psycholinguistics of dialogue, approaching language use as a social activity.

In this book, Andrew J. Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart delineate the relationship between “language in particular” and “culture in general” by focusing on language as both social practice and a means of classifying and interpreting the world. A traditional linguistic approach to a focus on language is illuminated by their anthropological emphasis on the embodiment of relationships and experience. In the book, the body is placed in the foreground for understanding language in culture, which helps in turn to understand how it enables us to adapt to the world of lived material experience. Written in an accessible style and drawing on an extensive corpus of primary field research from Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Japan, Taiwan, Scotland, and Ireland, Strathern and Stewart present a world anthropology which links together European, North American, and Asia-Pacific approaches to the topic. Students and scholars alike of sociocultual anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and linguistics will benefit from this engaging work on how the various components of our culture are informed and shaped through language.

Opening Dialogue examines the effects of classroom discourse on learning in 8th- and 9th-grade literature classes, with broad implications for all grade levels and subjects. Dozens of schools and thousands of students participated in this study, the largest in the field. Contents: Dialogic Instruction: When Recitation Becomes Conversation * The Big Picture: Language and Learning in Hundreds of English Lessons * A Closer Look at Authentic Interaction: Profiles of Student, Teacher Talk in Two Classrooms * What's a Teacher to Do?

With her theory of Language as Dialogue, Edda Weigand has opened up a new and promising perspective in linguistic research and its neighbouring disciplines. Her model of competence-in-performance solved the problem of how to bridge the gap between competence and performance and thus substantially shaped the way in which people look at language today. This book traces Weigand s linguistic career from its beginning to today and comprises a selection of articles which take the reader on a vivid and fascinating journey through the most important stages of her theorizing. The initial stage when a model of communicative competence was developed is followed by a gradual transition period which finally resulted in the theory of the dialogic action game as a mixed game or the Mixed Game Model. The articles cover a wide range of linguistic topics including, among others, speech act theory, lexical semantics, utterance grammar, emotions, the media, rhetoric and institutional communication. Editorial introductions give further information on the origin and theoretical background of the articles included."

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Dialogue is the first comprehensive overview of the emerging and rapidly growing sub-discipline in linguistics, Language and Dialogue. Edited by one of the top scholars in the field, Edda Weigand, and comprising contributions written by a variety of likewise influential figures, the handbook aims to describe the history of modern linguistics as reasoned progress leading from de Saussure and the simplicity of artificial terms to the complexity of human action and behaviour, which is based on the integration of human abilities such as speaking, thinking, perceiving, and having emotions. The book is divided into three sections: the first focuses on the history of modern linguistics and related disciplines; the second part focuses on the core issues and open debates in the field of Language and Dialogue and introduces the arguments pro and contra certain positions; and the third section focuses on the three components that fundamentally affect language use: human nature, institutions, and culture. This handbook is the ideal resource for those interested in the relationship between Language and Dialogue, and will be of use to students and researchers in Linguistics and related fields such as Discourse Analysis, Cognitive Linguistics, and Communication.

This volume is the first to explore links between the Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin's theoretical insights about language and practical concerns with second and foreign language learning and teaching. Situated within a strong conceptual framework and drawing from a rich empirical base, it reflects recent scholarship in applied linguistics that has begun to move away from formalist views of language as universal, autonomous linguistic systems, and toward an understanding of language as dynamic collections of cultural resources. According to Bakhtin, the study of language is concerned with the dialogue existing between linguistic elements and the uses to which they are put in response to the conditions of the moment. Such a view of language has significant implications for current understandings of second- and foreign-language learning. The contributors draw on some of Bakhtin's more significant concepts, such as dialogue, utterance, heteroglossia, voice, and addressivity to examine real world contexts of language learning. The chapters address a range of contexts including elementary- and university-level English as a second language and foreign language classrooms and adult learning situations outside the formal classroom. The text is arranged in two parts. Part I, "Contexts of Language Learning and Teaching," contains seven chapters that report on investigations into specific contexts of language learning and teaching. The chapters in Part II, "Implications for Theory and Practice," present broader discussions on second and foreign language learning using Bakhtin's ideas as a springboard for thinking. This is a groundbreaking volume for scholars in applied linguistics, language education, and language studies with an interest in second and foreign language learning; for teacher educators; and for teachers of languages from elementary to university levels. It is highly relevant as a text for graduate-level courses in applied linguistics and second- and foreign-language education.

Sandra Carberry addresses the problem of creating computational strategies that can improve user-computer communication by assimilating ongoing dialogue and reasoning on the acquired knowledge. In most current natural language systems each query is treated as an isolated request for information regardless of its context in dialogue. Sandra Carberry addresses the problem of creating computational strategies that can improve user-computer communication by assimilating ongoing dialogue and reasoning on the acquired knowledge. Plan Recognition in Natural Language Dialogue critically examines plan recognition - the inference of an agent's goals and how he or she intends to achieve them. It describes significant models of plan inference and presents in detail the author's own model, which infers new goals from user utterances and integrates them into the system's model of the user's plan, incrementally expanding and adding detail to its beliefs about what the information seeker wants to do. Carberry then outlines computational strategies for interpreting two kinds of problematic utterances: utterances that violate the pragmatic rules of the system's world model and intersentential elliptical fragments. She also suggests directions for future research. Plan Recognition in Natural Language Dialogue is included in the ACL-MIT Press Series in Natural Language Processing edited by Aravind Joshi.