This new book offers a timely and lively appraisal of the concept of communicative repertoires, resources we use to express who we are when in dialogue with others. Each chapter describes and illustrates the communicative resources humans deploy daily, but rarely think about – not only the multiple languages we use, but how we dress or gesture, how we greet each other or tell stories, the nicknames we coin, and the mass media references we make – and how these resources combine in infinitely varied performances of identity. Rymes also discusses how our repertoires shift and grow over the course of a lifetime, as well how a repertoire perspective can lead to a rethinking of cultural diversity and human interaction, from categorizing people’s differences to understanding how our repertoires can expand and overlap with other, thereby helping us to find common ground and communicate in increasingly multicultural schools, workplaces, markets, and social spheres. Rymes affirms the importance of the communicative repertoires concept with highly engaging discussions and contemporary examples from mass media, popular culture, and everyday life. The result is a fresh and exciting work that will resonate with students and scholars in sociolinguistics, intercultural communication, applied linguistics, and education.

Our use of everyday language should be mysterious, but familiarity hides the feeling of mystery. This book is a brief meditation on that mysterious activity. Building language outward from descriptions of the present moment, the meditation moves through our talk about space and time, to the realm of everyday thinking and science. But language enriches us further--through communities of meaning (morality, art, mysticism) to transcendence (the universe, God, and self). This meditation repeatedly cycles us from familiarity to wonder--about community, about consciousness, and ultimately about life itself.

This ethnographic work examines both the colonial language governmentality imposed by the Turkish state and the Kurdish language activism as a response to this system. Through a genealogical study, it calls for a reconsideration of the linguistic condition in Turkey as being more than nationalist, highlighting its foundation in intertwined ideologies of racism, imperialism, and colonialism. It then provides an analysis of new possibilities and directions led by the actors of the Kurdish language movement, which seeks to enhance not only the linguistic but also the socio-political condition of the Kurdish people by taking a "beyond language" approach. The work advances our thinking about language oppression and minority language activism.

Beyond Language (Oltre il Linguaggio) is one of Italian philosopher Emmanuele Severino's major works, wrestling with whether it's possible to think meaningfully outside of the restrictions of language. Increasingly recognised as a truly foundational thinker in the formation of contemporary theory, Severino's ideas around self-expression, forms of communication and the limitations of language continue are brought to the fore in this book. Beyond Language specifically opens the door to the themes that Severino developed in his later works, including the concrete meaning of self-being and the decline of language. The depth and breadth of Severino's philosophical insight is as profound today as it was when first penned in 1992, making this first English translation of a key work in the history of continental philosophy crucial reading for those engaged with contemporary theory.

The way speakers in multilingual contexts develop own varieties in their interactions sheds light on code switching and multimodal dynamic co-constructions of grammar in use. This volume explores the intersection of multimodality and language use of multilingual speakers. Firstly, theoretical frames are discussed and empirical studies involving Catalan, German and Spanish as L1, L2 or FL are presented interconnecting verbal and gestural modalities into grammar description or exploring actions as sources for gestures, which may nonverbally represent the argument in German dynamic motion verbs. Other chapters focus on positionings in interviews, lexical access searches or proxemics in greetings and farewells. The contributions secondly focus on verbal features of language use in multilingual contexts related to self-representation and co-construction of identity through code-switching, deixis or argumentative reasoning in different communicative events based on multilingual data of languages including Croatian, English, Italian, Brazilian-Portuguese and Polish. The findings call for a reviewed conception of grammar description with implications also for the conceptualization of deixis, for L2/foreign language acquisition and language teaching policies.

The problem of speaking about God arises from the presumed notion that God is utterly transcendent and is “wholly other” from human existence. Moreover, a profound sense of mystery is held to surround God’s being. Even so, Not Beyond Language maintains that it is still possible for human beings to express and describe God in words—that language can bring genuine disclosure and understanding of the divine. However, given that religious language is problematic because inadequate, those who engage in speaking about God must accept that the words they use cannot be pressed to yield precise definitions or complete explanations of the divine. The author proposes a nuanced approach to the use of religious language which revolves more around meaning and relevance of the discourse about divine reality, than objective claims about who or what God is.

Conducting an analysis of Saussure's intellectual heritage, this book links Sassurean notions of cognition, language, and history to early Romantic theories of cognition and the transmission of cultural memory. In particular, several fundamental categories of Saussure's philosophy of language, such as the differential nature of language, the mutability and immutability of semiotic values, and the duality of the signifier and the signified, are rooted in early Romantic theories of 'progressive' cognition and child cognitive development.