Units, rules, codes, systems: this is how most linguists study language. Integrationalists such as Michael Toolan, however, focus instead on how language functions in seamless tandem with the rest of human activity. In Total Speech, Toolan provides a clear and comprehensive account of integrationalism, a major new theory of language that declines to accept that text and context, language and world, are distinct and stable categories. At the same time, Toolan extends the integratio...

This book analyses diverse public discourses to investigate how wealth inequality has been portrayed in the British media from the time of the Second World War to the present day. Using a variety of corpus-assisted methods of discourse analysis, chapters present an historicized perspective on how the mass media have helped to make sharply increased wealth inequality seem perfectly normal. Print, radio and online media sources are interrogated using methodologies grounded in critical discou...

This book takes the following question as its starting point: What are some of the crucial things the reader must do in order to make sense of a literary narrative? The book is a study of the texture of narrative fiction, using stylistics, corpus linguistic principles (especially Hoey’s work on lexical patterning), narratological ideas, and cognitive stylistic work by Werth, Emmott, and others. Michael Toolan explores the textual/grammatical nature of fictional narratives, critically re-ex...

Why in the early 1970s does The Times reject the idea of a national lottery, as rewarding luck not merit and effort, but warmly welcome one by the 1990s? Why in the 1970s do the Daily Mail's TV reviews address serious contemporary themes such as class- and race-relations, whereas forty years later they are largely concerned with celebrities, talent shows, and nostalgia? Why does the Conservative Chancellor in the 2010s mention 'Britain' so very often, when the Conservative Chancellor in th...

First published in 1992, this wide-ranging collection of essays focuses on the principle of contextualisation as it applies to the interpretation, description, theorising and reading of literary and non-literary texts. The collection aims to reveal the interdependencies between theory, analysis, text and context by challenging the myth that stylistics entails a fundamental separation of text from context, linguistic description from descriptive interpretation, or language from situation. T...

An activity-based introduction to stylistics, this textbook explains some of the topics in literary linguistics and helps students in analysing written texts. How can you tell good writing - the excellent, the brilliant and the ingenious - from bad writing - the weak, the banal and the confusing? By looking at the technique and the craft of writing, Language in Literature examines the ways in which language is organised to create particular meanings or effects. Covering a range of...

This classic text has been substantially rewritten. Narrative explores a range of written, spoken, literary and non-literary narratives. It shows what systematic attention to language can reveal about the narratives themselves, their tellers, and those to whom they are addressed.New material includes sections on gendered narrative, film narrative and a discussion of ways in which the internet and global television are changing conceptions of narrative.

This book demonstrates the relevance of an integrational linguistic perspective to a practical, real-world need, namely the learning of languages. Integrational linguistics’ shunning of both realist and structuralist theories of language, its commitment to an unwavering attention to the perspective of the language user, and its adherence to a semiology in which signs are the situated products of interactants interpretive behaviour, mean that it radically reconceptualizes language learning ...

Politeness is key to all of our relationships and plays a fundamental part in the way we communicate with each other and the way we define ourselves. It is not limited only to conventional aspects of linguistic etiquette, but encompasses all types of interpersonal behaviour through which we explore and maintain our relationships. This groundbreaking exploration navigates the reader through this fascinating area and introduces them to a variety of new insights. The book is divided into thre...

This classic book is a straightforward introduction to linguistics which attempts to answer two fundamental questions: 'What is language?' and 'How does language work?' It outlines the scope of linguistics, explaining basic concepts and essential terminology with examples drawn mainly from English. Sound patterning, syntax and meaning - the inner core of linguistics - are discussed simply and clearly, as are the rapidly growing areas of pragmatics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics and s...

Those aspects of language use that are crucial to an understanding of language as a system, and especially to an understanding of meaning, are the acknowledged concern of linguistic pragmatics. This textbook provides a lucid and integrative analysis of the central topics in pragmatics - deixis, implicature, presupposition, speech acts, and conversational structure. A central concern of the book is the relation between pragmatics and semantics, and Dr Levinson shows clearly how a pragmatic ...

How are humorous meanings generated and interpreted? Understanding a joke involves knowledge of the language code (a matter mostly of semantics) and background knowledge necessary for making the inferences to get the joke (a matter of pragmatics). This book introduces and critiques a wide range of semantic and pragmatic theories in relation to humour, such as systemic functional linguistics, speech acts, politeness and relevance theory, emphasising not only conceptual but also interpersona...