This volume comprises the second part of selected papers of the International Pragmatics Conference in Antwerp, August 1987.

This book provides a practical but scientifically grounded step-by-step approach to the adaptation of tests in linguistic and cultural contexts.

Language Adaptation examines the process by which a speech community is forced to adopt an active role in making its language suitable for changing functional requirements. This wide-ranging collection of essays looks at this phenomenon from a variety of historical and synchronic perspectives, and brings together the work of a number of leading scholars in the field. Several different languages are examined at different stages of their history, including Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Kiswahili, German and Hindi. This well-informed book is a significant contribution to the existing literature on language planning, and is the first to use one theoretical concept to deal with the relationship between natural and deliberate language change. It shows that language adaptation is a particular aspect of language change, and thus establishes a link between the social and the historical study of language. It will appeal to graduate students and professionals in linguistics and the social sciences, as well as to practitioners of language planning.

The Language of Daily Life in England (1400–1800) is an important state-of-the art account of historical sociolinguistic and socio-pragmatic research. The volume contains nine studies and an introductory essay which discuss linguistic and social variation and change over four centuries. Each study tackles a linguistic or social phenomenon, and approaches it with a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, always embedded in the socio-historical context. The volume presents new information on linguistic variation and change, while evaluating and developing the relevant theoretical and methodological tools. The writers form one of the leading research teams in the field, and, as compilers of the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, have an informed understanding of the data in all its depth. This volume will be of interest to scholars in historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and socio-pragmatics, but also e.g. social history. The approachable style of writing makes it also inviting for advanced students.

Based on a corpus of private email from Jamaican university students, this study explores the discourse functions of Jamaican Creole in computer-mediated communication. From this participant-centered perspective, it contributes to the longstanding theoretical debates in Creole studies about the 'Creole continuum'. This book will likewise be useful to researchers of computer-mediated communication, the use and development of non-standardized languages, language ecology, and code switching. The central methodological issue in this study is code switching in a written medium, a neglected area of study at the moment since most literature in code switching research is based on spoken data. The three analytical chapters present the data in a critical discussion of established and more recent theoretical approaches to code switching research. The fields of research that will benefit from this book include pragmatics and discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, Creole studies, English as a world language, the study of language in computer-mediated communication, and linguistic anthropology.

This exhaustive linguistic dictionary has been designed both for classroom use and for English language professionals. It provides a unique and effective learning source which ‘mirrors’ the continual spring of linguistic knowledge. It suggests a comprehensive, insightful analysis of the highly controversial and complicated issues of present day linguistics. This dictionary provides a pedagogical tool for those teaching various aspects of language to both upper lever undergraduates and graduate level researchers, and exploits the benefits of Turkish, Azerbaijani and Russian language scholarship in this field.