Language in Use: Cognitive and Discourse Perspectives on Language and Language Learning

Language in Use creatively brings together, for the first time, perspectives from cognitive linguistics, language acquisition, discourse analysis, and linguistic anthropology. The physical distance between nations and continents, and the boundaries between different theories and subfields within linguistics have made it difficult to recognize the possibilities of how research from each of these fields can challenge, inform, and enrich the others. This book aims to make those boundaries more transparent and encourages more collaborative research.

The unifying theme is studying how language is used in context and explores how language is shaped by the nature of human cognition and social-cultural activity. Language in Use examines language processing and first language learning and illuminates the insights that discourse and usage-based models provide in issues of second language learning. Using a diverse array of methodologies, it examines how speakers employ various discourse-level resources to structure interaction and create meaning. Finally, it addresses issues of language use and creation of social identity.

Unique in approach and wide-ranging in application, the contributions in this volume place emphasis on the analysis of actual discourse and the insights that analyses of such data bring to language learning as well as how language shapes and reflects social identity -- making it an invaluable addition to the library of anyone interested in cutting-edge linguistics.

Tyler (linguistics, Georgetown U.) presents a selection of papers from a 2003 international conference held at Georgetown offering perspectives from cognitive linguistics, language acquisition, discourse analysis, and linguistic anthropology on how language is used in context and is shaped by the nature of human cognition and social-cultural activity. Sixteen papers are organized into sections on language processing and first-language learning, issues in second- language learning, discourse resources and meaning construction, and language and identity. A sampling of topics: homonyms and functional mappings in language acquisition, learning the discourse of friendship, linguistic variation in the lexical episodes of university classroom talk, and hypothetical narratives in parent- child discourse. No subject index. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Andrea E. Tyler is a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University. She is coauthor (with Vyvyan Evans) of The Semantics of English Prepositions: Spatial Scenes, Embodied Meaning, and Cognition and Language and Space.

Mari Takada is a PhD candidate in linguistics at Georgetown University.

Yiyoung Kim is a PhD candidate in applied linguistics at Georgetown University.

Diana Marinova is a graduate student in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University.