Charles C. Fries (1887-1967) was a major figure in American linguistics and language education during the first half of the 20th century. Theoretical innovation and practical implementation were important threads that ran throughout his work. Fries believed that the attempt to deal with practical problems was a vital part of developing linguistic theory. He spent most of his effort exploring grammar as a tool for communicating meaning. Charles C. Fries was quite influential in the development of linguistics in the United States, and yet in some ways remained outside of the mainstream of the linguistics he helped to develop. The contributors to this volume were asked to present and evaluate some aspect of Fries’ work and to show how similar ideas are being used today.

As an unparalleled introduction to missionary communication, this thoroughly indexed book examines world views, cognitive processes, linguistic forms, behavioral patterns, social structures, communication media, and motivational sources.

This set reprints key journal articles originally published between 1915 and 1995, and covers all of the major assessments of Bloomfield's work.

The imperative mood as a whole has generally been neglected by Greek grammarians. The Greek Imperative Mood in the New Testament: A Cognitive and Communicative Approach utilizes insights from modern linguistics and communication theory in order to propose an inherent (semantic) meaning for the mood and describe the way in which it is used in the New Testament (pragmatics). A linguistic theory called neuro-cognitive stratificational linguistics is used to help isolate the morphological imperative mood and focus on addressing issues directly related to this area, while principles from a communication theory called relevance theory provide a theoretical basis for describing the usages of the mood. This book also includes a survey of New Testament and select linguistic approaches to the imperative mood and proposes that the imperative mood is volitional-directive and should be classified in a multidimensional manner. Each imperative should be classified according to force, which participant (speaker or hearer) benefits from the fulfillment of the imperative, and where the imperative falls within the event sequence of the action described in the utterance. In this context, sociological factors such as the rank of participants and level of politeness are discussed together with other pragmatic-related information. The Greek Imperative Mood in the New Testament is a valuable teaching tool for intermediate and advanced Greek classes.

Ray L. Birdwhistell, in this study of human body motion (a study he terms kinesics), advances the theory that human communication needs and uses all the senses, that the information conveyed by human gestures and movements is coded and patterned differently in various cultures, and that these codes can be discovered by skilled scrutiny of particular movements within a social context.