This dissertation is a linguistic approach to theology informed by the philosophical work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. It is situated in the construction of Puerto Rican identity in the elliptic Puerto Rican geography of the island and the Puerto Rican immigration settlements on the mainland. Its goal is the truthful proclamation of the Gospel to the…

How might institutional projects to improve the status of minority languages and publics have unintended and contradictory consequences? This dissertation examines media and language practices in order to illuminate the everyday sociocultural processes by which the value of knowledge is figured. It focuses on news media institutions in the Buryat…

This study is concerned with the acquisition of English verb transitivity by native speakers of Japanese. Both a verb's semantic class (Levin, 1993; Pinker, 1989) and its frequency (Ambridge et al., 2008) have been proposed to influence the acquisition of verbs in L1. For example, verbs whose meaning entails change-of-location or…

Many of the questions received by the magazine column "Ask Teaching Tolerance" are from educators seeking advice about how to respond when someone--a student, a colleague, even a parent--uses biased language or stereotypes in school. This booklet is a response to these questions. It's for educators who want to develop the skills to speak up…

Both the language of performance management and the target-setting culture of our schools lead to a "depersonalisation" of education--a failure to respect young learners as persons. They become a "means" to some further non-educational "end". John Macmurray challenged this depersonalisation in terms not only of its impoverished educational…

Depending on how one does the math, there are between a quarter-million and a million words in the English language. Of all these words, the author holds in contempt only one. That word is "like"--not the tepid expression of mild appreciation but the parasitic form that now bleeds the mother tongue, marks the user as a dunce, and, were it truly…

According to the nonce borrowing hypothesis (NBH), "[n]once borrowings pattern exactly like their native counterparts in the (unmixed) recipient language" (Poplack & Meechan, 1998a, p. 137). Nonce borrowings (Sankoff, Poplack & Vanniarajan, 1990, p. 74) are "lone other-language items" which differ from established borrowings in terms of frequency…

Following on from my state-of-the-art article on "Language Awareness and language learning" (Svalberg 2007), in this paper I will discuss specific research tasks which are centrally concerned with different aspects of language awareness (LA): "explicit knowledge about language, and conscious perception and sensitivity in language learning,…

Focusing on matters of power and difference, this article examines rhetorical theories of genre and James Gee's theory of Discourse. Although both theories offer productive ways of understanding literate practice, it is argued, they are limited in crucial respects. Genre theory offers few ways of understanding how and why some social actors have…

The discussion in this article focuses on how the gap between academic knowledge and regional development can be bridged, creating conditions for change processes between researchers and regional agents. Institutional entrepreneurs can create regional development organisations and research organisations, but in order to fulfil regional needs it is…

This paper examines the ways in which world Englishes studies are developing into a distinct academic discipline, and discusses the consequences of this regimentation of knowledge for teaching and research. By first outlining the various ways in which bodies of knowledge are organized into discrete disciplines, and then surveying the history and…

First published in anticipation of the quincentennial of Christopher Columbus's "discovery" of the Americas, Gerald Vizenor's novel "The Heirs of Columbus" (1991) appropriates the European narrative of discovery to privilege a Native perspective that follows "trickster discourse," a mode that rejects the tragic narratives of the European…

The medical literature reports that antiretrovirals (ARVs) are considered attitudinal objects (Dunbar-Jacob, 1995). Drawing on the pragmatics of emotion (Caffi & Janney, 1994), this study analyzes how patients' stances about their ARTs shape their emotional relationships with their treatments. The data, collected in a public hospital in…

Discourse cohesion and coherence give communication its continuity providing the grammatical and lexical links that hold an utterance or text together and give it meaning. Researchers often link cohesion and coherence deficits to the frontal lobes by drawing attention to frontal lobe dysfunction in populations where discourse cohesion and…

Actualization is traditionally seen as the process following syntactic reanalysis whereby an item's new syntactic status manifests itself in new syntactic behavior. The process is gradual in that some new uses of the reanalyzed item appear earlier or more readily than others. This article accounts for the order in which new uses appear during…