Linguistics
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 Sale: $8.98 Trade Paper List Price $17.95 
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Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World
by Nicholas Ostler  Publisher Comments Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word is the first history of the world's great tongues, gloriously celebrating the wonder of words that binds communities together and makes possible both the living of a common history and the telling of it. From the...
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New: $35.00 Hardcover
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The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World
by David W. Anthony Publisher Comments Roughly half the world's population speaks languages derived from a shared linguistic source known as Proto-Indo-European. But who were the early speakers of this ancient mother tongue, and how did they manage to spread it around the globe? Until now...
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New: $14.95 Hardcover
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Semantic Antics: How and Why Words Change Meaning
by Sol Steinmetz Publisher Comments A fun, new approach to examining etymology! Many common English words started out with an entirely different meaning than the one we know today. For example: The word adamant came into English around 855 C.E. as a synonym for 'diamond,' very different...
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Sale: $23.00 Hardcover List Price $27.95
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By Hook or by Crook
by David Crystal Synopsis In this delightful excursion through the English language, Crystal combines personal reflections, historical allusions, and a traveler's observations to create a mesmerizing and entertaining narrative account with the language and its speakers....
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New: $21.95 Trade Paper
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Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language
by Daniel Heller-roazen Publisher Comments Just as speech can be acquired, so can it be lost. Speakers can forget words, phrases, even entire languages they once knew; over the course of time peoples, too, let go of the tongues that were once theirs, as languages disappear and give way to the...
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Sale: $8.98 Trade Paper List Price $30.50
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Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk Among Friends
by Deborah Tannen Publisher Comments This revised edition of Deborah Tannen's first discourse analysis book, Conversational Style--first published in 1984--presents an approach to analyzing conversation that later became the hallmark and foundation of her extensive body of work in discourse...
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New: $27.95 Hardcover
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Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin
by Nicholas Ostler Publisher Comments The Latin language has been the one constant in the cultural history of the West for more than two millennia. It has been the foundation of our education, and has defined the way in which we express our thoughts, our faith, and our knowledge of how the...
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Used: $9.95 Trade Paper List Price $21.95
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How Languages Are Learned (Oxford Handbooks for Language Teachers)
by Patsy M Lightbown Publisher Comments This series offers useful references for language teachers, teacher trainers, and trainees. This book presents the main theories of language acquisition, and considers their bearing on language teaching. It also discusses the effects of factors such as...
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Teach Yourself Linguistics (Teach Yourself)
by Jean Aitchison Publisher Comments Teach Yourself Linguistics is a straightforward introduction to linguistics, the systematic study that seeks to answer two fundamental questions: "What is language?" and "How does language work?" This book outlines the scope of linguistics, explaining...
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Used: $19.95 Trade Paper List Price $26.95
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Basic Concepts of Intercultural Communication
by Milton Bennett Synopsis A collection of classic and contemporary articles on intercultural communication, for students, practitioners, and educators. Selections were chosen on the basis of readability, and are arranged in a developmental sequence. Themes include communication...
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Used: $12.50 Trade Paper List Price $18.95
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How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads (Counterpunch)
by Daniel Cassidy Publisher Comments In a series of lively essays, this pioneering book proves that US slang has its strongest wellsprings in nineteenth-century Irish America. "Jazz" and "poker," "sucker" and "scam" all derive from Irish. While demonstrating this, Daniel Cassidy...
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New: $28.00 Hardcover
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The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind and Ecology
by Robert Bringhurst Publisher Comments “Poems, where I come from,” writes Robert Bringhurst, “are spoken to be written and written to be spoken. The Tree of Meaning is a book of critical prose composed in the same way.” Together these 13 lectures present a...
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Used: $17.95 Hardcover List Price $26.00
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Bastard Tongues: A Trailblazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World's Lowliest Languages
by Derek Bickerton Publisher Comments Why Do Isolated Creole Languages Tend to Have Similar Grammatical Structures? Bastard Tongues is an exciting, firsthand story of scientific discovery in an area of research close to the heart of what it means to be human—what language is...
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New: $24.95 Hardcover
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Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language
by Seth Lerer Publisher Comments Why is there such a striking difference between English spelling and English pronunciation? How did our seemingly relatively simple grammar rules develop? What are the origins of regional dialect, literary language, and everyday speech, and what do they...
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Used: $11.50 Trade Paper List Price $34.95
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North American Icelandic: The Life of a Language
by Bir Arnbjornsdottir Synopsis North American Icelandic evolved mainly in Icelandic settlements in Manitoba and North Dakota and is the only version of Icelandic that is not spoken in Iceland. But North American Icelandic is a dying language with few left who speak it. North American...
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Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet from A to Z
by David Sacks Publisher Comments David Sacks has embarked on a fun, lively, and learned excursion into the alphabet–and into cultural history–in Letter Perfect. Clearly explaining the letters as symbols of precise sounds of speech, the book begins with the earliest known...
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Used: $5.95 Hardcover List Price $23.75
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Publication of the American Dialect Society #84: Small-Town Values and Big-City Vowels: A Study of the Northern Cities Shift in Michigan
by Matthew J Gordon Synopsis This book presents a sociolinguistic study of the Northern Cities Shift, a complex pattern of vowel changes heard across the traditional Inland North dialect region of the United States. The study reports on how residents of small towns are reacting to...
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Used: $9.50 Trade Paper List Price $29.25
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Blooming English: Observations on the Roots, Cultivation and Hybrids of the English Language
by Kate Burridge Publisher Comments A fascinating and well-crafted look at the quirks of the English language, past and present....
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Used: $7.25 Trade Paper List Price $13.00
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Doing Our Own Thing
by John Mcwhorter Publisher Comments In Doing Our Own Thing, critically acclaimed linguist and cultural critic John McWhorter traces the precipitous decline of language in contemporary America, arguing persuasively that casual, everyday speech has conquered the formal in all arenas, from...
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The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left
by David Crystal Publisher Comments Weve all been taught that this sentence--"Driving in from the airport, the flags flapped furiously"--is wrong, wrong, wrong. But is it, asks David Crystal. Everyone knows what this sentence means. No one actually thinks that the flags were driving the...
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