This second volume in honour of Michael Halliday contains three sections: The Design of Language, Text and Discourse and Exploring Language as Social Semiotic, and concludes with a recent interview conducted by Paul Thibault in which Halliday provides further insights in his theory of language. The essential design features of language are semantic, lexico-grammatical and phonological. Text for Halliday is a semantic unit expressed by the lexico-grammatical and phonological patterns in language. The papers in the first section study aspects of these three strata of language and the relation between them. The second section deals with units higher than the clause complex and the papers there attempt to integrate the analysis of the lexico-grammatical and phonological systems into higher level discourse units. The papers in the third section develop the notion of language as social semiotic which is central to Haliday’s model of language.

This textbook offers an introductory overview of eight hotly-debated topics in second language acquisition research. It offers a glimpse of how SLA researchers have tried to answer common questions about second language acquisition rather than being a comprehensive introduction to SLA research. Each chapter comprises an introductory discussion of the issues involved and suggestions for further reading and study. The reader is asked to consider the issues based on their own experiences, thus allowing them to compare their own intuitions and experiences with established research findings and gain an understanding of methodology. The topics are treated independently so that they can be read in any order that interests the reader.

Interpreters who work with signed languages and those who work strictly with spoken languages share many of the same issues regarding their training, skill sets, and fundamentals of practice. Yet interpreting into and from signed languages presents unique challenges for the interpreter, who works with language that must be seen rather than heard. The contributions in this volume focus on topics of interest to both students of signed language interpreting and practitioners working in community, conference, and education settings. Signed languages dealt with include American Sign Language, Langue des Signes Québécoise and Irish Sign Language, although interpreters internationally will find the discussion in each chapter relevant to their own language context. Topics concern theoretical and practical components of the interpreter’s work, including interpreters’ approaches to language and meaning, their role on the job and in the communities within which they work, dealing with language variation and consumer preferences, and Deaf interpreters as professionals in the field.

A thorough and accessible introduction to a range of key ideas in type systems for programming language. The study of type systems for programming languages now touches many areas of computer science, from language design and implementation to software engineering, network security, databases, and analysis of concurrent and distributed systems. This book offers accessible introductions to key ideas in the field, with contributions by experts on each topic. The topics covered include precise type analyses, which extend simple type systems to give them a better grip on the run time behavior of systems; type systems for low-level languages; applications of types to reasoning about computer programs; type theory as a framework for the design of sophisticated module systems; and advanced techniques in ML-style type inference. Advanced Topics in Types and Programming Languages builds on Benjamin Pierce's Types and Programming Languages (MIT Press, 2002); most of the chapters should be accessible to readers familiar with basic notations and techniques of operational semantics and type systems—the material covered in the first half of the earlier book. Advanced Topics in Types and Programming Languages can be used in the classroom and as a resource for professionals. Most chapters include exercises, ranging in difficulty from quick comprehension checks to challenging extensions, many with solutions.

Language Resources (LRs) are sets of language data and descriptions in machine readable form, such as written and spoken language corpora, terminological databases, computational lexica and dictionaries, and linguistic software tools. Over the past few decades, mainly within research environments, LRs have been specifically used to create, optimise or evaluate natural language processing (NLP) and human language technologies (HLT) applications, including translation-related technologies. Gradually the infrastructures and exploitation tools of LRs are being perceived as core resources in the language services industries and in localisation production settings. However, some efforts ought yet to be made to raise further awareness about LRs in general, and LRs for translation and localisation in particular to a wider audience in all corners of the world. Topics in Language Resources for Translation and Localisation sets out to establish the state of the art of this ever expanding field and underscores the usefulness that LRs can potentially have in the process of creating, adapting, managing, standardising and leveraging content for more than one language and culture from various perspectives.

This is a general introduction to the methods and principles behind English linguistics study, suitable for students at advanced level and beyond. Written with input from the Cambridge Corpus, it looks at the way meaning is made using authentic written and spoken examples. This helps students give confident analysis and articulate responses. Using short activities to help explain analysis methods, the book guides students through major modern issues and concepts. It summarises key concerns and modern findings, while providing inspiration for language investigations and non-examined assessments (NEAs) with research suggestions.

Topics in Language and Culture for Teachers is an introductory language and culture text designed for today's future teachers, anthropologists, and applied linguists. The book explores, from a variety of perspectives, the interrelationships between language and culture that have the most significant implications for the classroom and for the global community. Among the topics introduced are first language acquisition, dialects, sign language, non-verbal communication, and pragmatics. Each chapter is structured so that students will read about a topic, answer comprehension questions, consider relevant teaching scenarios, gather and analyze data in further reading, and pursue projects that require out-of-class research. The book also encourages the use of films to provide deeper cultural understanding and context for various issues. Three appendixes-the family tree of languages, language structure, resources for further research and professional development-and a glossary are included.