The 13 chapters in this volume explore what is known and what still needs to be learned about the complex relationships between speaking and writing. The first chapter in the book provides a detailed overview of linguistic studies of oral and written language relationships. The next three chapters focus on the relationships between children's oral and written language skills and what these relationships imply about the teaching of writing and reading. Chapters five and six consider oral and written language in a societal context, while chapters seven, eight, and nine are concerned with methodological issues in the study of speaking-writing relationships, each suggesting a way to broaden the understanding of these relationships. The next two chapters broaden the understanding of oral-written relationships by considering two special groups of individuals who often struggle to learn English--speakers of other languages and the profoundly deaf. The final two chapters focus on pedagogy, such as integrating speaking and writing in a business communications course. (RL)

By treating writing as an independent mode of communication, based on the use of spatial relations to connect events separated in time, the author shows how other forms of writing obey the same principles.In Signs of Writing Roy Harris re-examines basic questions about writing that have long been obscured by the traditional assumption that writing is merely a visual substitute for speech.By treating writing as an independent mode of communication, based on the use of spatial relations to connect events separated in time, the author shows how musical, mathematical and other forms of writing obey the same principles as verbal writing. These principles, he argues, apply to texts of all kinds: a sonnet, a symphonic score, a signature on a cheque and a supermarket label. Moreover, they apply throughout the history of writing, from hieroglyphics to hypertext.This is the first book to provide a new general theory of writing in over forty years. Signs of Writing will be essential reading for anyone interested in language and communication.

Speech In Motion’s Sign Language Workbook took over a year to put together. The vocabulary was chosen from thousands of words that are used everyday. The words we chose are words that give you the ability to sign very basic sentences with the first lesson. The book is designed to add a little fun in learning to sign. We want you to enjoy it. We stress exercises like fingerspelling and knowing how the sign is formed. There is not a sign for every word so your ability to fingerspell is important. Don’t let anyone tell you it is not. While learning to sign fingerspelling is your tool to being able to communicate.

Speechwriting is the definitive guide to writing a speech, revealing all the tools and techniques of the trade, such as how to win an argument, construct a sound bite and perform on stage. The first part of the book covers the arts of persuasion, argument, story telling and metaphor, providing a solid grounding in the theory of speechwriting, which should appeal to anyone with an interest in politics, communication or language. The second part covers the crafts of editing, sound bites, media manipulation, performance and strategy, giving invaluable practical guidance to professional or aspiring speechwriters. This book combines academic rigour with practical nous, drawing on lessons from Aristotle to Obama. It is the essential guide for anyone who writes speeches, for themselves or others, in politics, PR or business.

In recent years, the focus of linguistic research has shifted from sentence to larger units such as text and discourse and accordingly from syntax to semantics and pragmatics. This has led to the development and application of corresponding discourse semantic and pragmatic theories such as, for instance, (S)DRT, Centering Theory, Accessibility Theory, QUD, Generalized Conversational Implicatures, Super Monsters and Gesture Semantics and new empirical approaches in the framework of experimental semantics and pragmatics or corpus linguistic discourse analysis. The contributions to this collected volume build on these developments and investigate the linguistic foundations of narration from various perspectives. The contributions address topics such as speech and thought representation, free indirect speech, information structure, anaphora resolution, co-speech gestures, classifier constructions as well as role shift and constructed action. The volume provides new insights in the linguistic structures underlying narration in written, spoken, and sign languages from an experimental, developmental, historical, typological, and theoretical perspective. The contributions will appeal to theoretical linguists, sign language linguists, typologists, literary scholars, psycholinguists, and philosophers.