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"Give me the salt" and "Please pass the salt" make the same request, but in a polite situation the first utterance may give offense, while the second may not. How and why such differences in wording and intonation, in a particular context, produce different effects is the concern of pragmatics, the area of linguistics that deals with how speech is used in interaction. In this innovative study of pragmatics in Brazilian Portuguese, Dale Koike analyzes the politeness phenomenon, specifically in the context of speech acts known as "directives."

As acts intended to get someone to do something, directives bring into play a variety of sociocultural factors, depending on the relationship between the participants. Using empirical data obtained through natural language observation and from questionnaires of over one hundred adult native speakers, Koike identifies factors—such as age, education, and gender—that influence the strategies of politeness a given speaker is likely to use in making a directive. This research clarifies the unwritten language rules and assumptions that native speakers intuitively follow in phrasing their directive utterances.

Koike also includes important material on the acquisition of strategies for politeness by children and adult second-language learners, as well as on gender differences in politeness forms. Her research proposes important additions to the theory of speech acts as conceived by Austin and Searle, particularly in the application of deictic organization to account for a hierarchy of pragmatic forms.

Language and Social Relationship in Brazilian Portuguese will be of interest to a wide audience in diverse fields, including linguistics, anthropology, interaction analysis, communications, semantics, sociology, psychology, and education.

If language and culture are intimately connected, then cultures involving people who speak more than one language must have special characteristics, as well as particular social issues to negotiate. What are the challenges faced by a people with two or more languages as their heritage? How does that multiple heritage affect cultural forms, including literature and the arts? How does linguistic difference influence the conceptualization and writing of history? And if the meeting of languages within a people has involved contestation and power, how are those conflicts negotiated? 

This volume uses the tools of critical theory to explore such questions with respect to the complex, multilingual history of Ireland. Avoiding the simplistic polarized oppositions popular with cultural nationalists, the contributors examine the nexus of language, tradition, and authority in Ireland that has created such a rich, multivalent culture. 

Although the linguistic interface of Irish and English has dominated cultural negotiations in Ireland over the last five hundred years, the island has an even longer history of linguistic and cultural exchange. Arguing that tradition is never static, the essays in this volume challenge the concept of a monolithic cultural origin, while insisting on the importance of inherited discourses in the continuity of culture through time and across linguistic difference. The chapters cover a broad range of topics from early Irish narratives and Latin hagiography to literary works by such writers as Yeats, Joyce, Friel, Montague, and McGahern, as well as other cultural forms, including traditional Irish music. Several chapters address issues of politics and power, from the role of interpreters in the relations between linguistic communities in Ireland to the politicization of language in Northern Ireland since the 1980s. Taken together, the essays illuminate scholarly domains as varied as postcolonial theory, the relationship between language and nation, the nature of tradition, and Irish literature of all periods.

In addition to the editors, contributors include Michael Cronin, Joanne Findon, Helen Fulton, Declan Kiberd, Jeremy Lowe, Gordon McCoy and Camille O'Reilly, Catherine McKenna, Cóilín Owens, Thomas Dillon Redshaw, and Sally K. Sommers Smith.

A wide-ranging history of the algorithm.

Bringing together the histories of mathematics, computer science, and linguistic thought, Language and the Rise of the Algorithm reveals how recent developments in artificial intelligence are reopening an issue that troubled mathematicians well before the computer age: How do you draw the line between computational rules and the complexities of making systems comprehensible to people? By attending to this question, we come to see that the modern idea of the algorithm is implicated in a long history of attempts to maintain a disciplinary boundary separating technical knowledge from the languages people speak day to day.
 
Here, Jeffrey M. Binder offers a compelling tour of four visions of universal computation that addressed this issue in very different ways: G. W. Leibniz’s calculus ratiocinator; a universal algebra scheme Nicolas de Condorcet designed during the French Revolution; George Boole’s nineteenth-century logic system; and the early programming language ALGOL, short for algorithmic language. These episodes show that symbolic computation has repeatedly become entangled in debates about the nature of communication. Machine learning, in its increasing dependence on words, erodes the line between technical and everyday language, revealing the urgent stakes underlying this boundary.
 
The idea of the algorithm is a levee holding back the social complexity of language, and it is about to break. This book is about the flood that inspired its construction.

In Language in Hand: Why Sign Came Before Speech, William C. Stokoe begins his exploration of the origin of human language with a 2400-year-old quote by Democritus: “Everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity.” Stokoe capitalizes upon this simple credo in this far-ranging examination of the scholarly topography to support his formula for the development of language in humans: gesture-to-language-to-speech. Intrinsic to this is the proposition that speech is sufficient for language, but not necessary. Chance brought human ancestors down from the trees to the ground, freeing their hands for gesture, and then sign language, a progression that came from the necessity to communicate.

       Stokoe recounts in Language in Hand how inspiration grew out of his original discovery in the 1950s and ’60s that deaf people who signed were using a true language with constructions that did not derive from spoken English. This erudite, highly engaging investigation calls upon decades of personal experience and published research to refute the recently entrenched principles that humans have a special, innate learning faculty for language and that speech equates with language. Integrating current findings in linguistics, semiotics, and anthropology, Stokoe fashions a closely-reasoned argument that suggests how our human ancestors’ powers of observation and natural hand movements could have evolved into signed morphemes.

       Stokoe also proposes how the primarily gestural expression of language with vocal support shifted to primarily vocal language with gestural accompaniment. When describing this transition, however, he never loses sight of the significance of humans in the natural world and the role of environmental stimuli in the development of language. Stokoe illustrates this contention with fascinating observations of small, contemporary ethnic groups such as the Assiniboin Nakotas, a Native American group from Montana that intermingle their spoken and signed languages depending upon cultural imperatives.

       Language in Hand also presents innovative thoughts on classifiers in American Sign Language and their similarity to certain spoken languages, convincing evidence that speech originally copied sign language forms before developing unrelated conventions through usage. Stokoe concludes with a hypothesis on how the acceptance of sign language as the first language of humans could revolutionize the education of infants, both deaf and hearing, who, like early humans, have the full capacity for language without speech.

Language, Resistance and Revival tells the untold story of the truly groundbreaking linguistic and educational developments that took place among Republican prisoners in Long Kesh prison from 1972-2000.

During a period of bitter struggle between Republican prisoners and the British state, the Irish language was taught and spoken as a form of resistance during incarceration. The book unearths this story for the first time and analyses the rejuvenating impact it had on the cultural revival in the nationalist community beyond the prison walls.

Based on unprecedented interviews, Feargal Mac Ionnrachtaigh explores a key period in Irish history through the original and 'insider' accounts of key protagonists in the contemporary Irish language revival.

Linguistic Human Rights (LHR) is a fast growing new area of study combining the principles of national and international law with the study of language as a central dimension of ethnicity. Implementation of these principles is aimed at ensuring that no state or society violates these basic rights.

This path breaking study broadens our knowledge of the important role of language in minority rights and in social and political struggles for LHRs. Exploring the interactions of linguistic diversity, biodiversity, the free market and human rights, the contributors present case studies to highlight such issues as Kurdish satellite TV attempting to create a virtual state on the air through trying to achieve basic LHR’s for Kurds in Turkey; the implementation of LHRs in the Baltic states; language rights activism in Canada; the spread of English as an international language; and the obstacles met in education by Roma and the Deaf in Hungary because of lack of appropriate LHRs.

Language: A Right and a Resource is a valuable multi-disciplinary text which can be used in a variety of different areas of study in the legal profession, linguistics, cultural and political studies.

In the modern world, success depends upon literacy, a fact especially true for deaf children who, if they read and write well, can take full advantage of e-mail, the Internet, and other communication innovations. Literacy and Your Deaf Child: What Every Parent Should Know provides parents with the means to ensure that their deaf or hard of hearing child becomes a proficient reader and writer. In nine chapters, parents will learn about the relationship of language to reading and writing, including the associated terminology, the challenges that deaf children face, and the role of schools. They’ll also learn activities that they can engage in at home that will strengthen their children’s reading and writing capabilities.

Literacy and Your Deaf Child begins by introducing some common concepts, among them the importance of parental involvement in a deaf child’s education. It outlines how children acquire language and describes the auditory and visual links to literacy. With this information, parents can make informed decisions regarding hearing aids, cochlear implants, speechreading, and sign communication, all of which can have a marked influence on their child’s language development. Parents will discover how to create environments at home and in their community for fostering their child’s literacy, especially in school by learning how to work closely with their child’s teachers. The book also refers throughout to the developmental link between American Sign Language and English literacy for children who use sign communication, making it the best guide available for all deaf children and their parents.

A bold rethinking of genre as both form and philosophical problem. 

Why do we have literary genres, and what problems do they solve? In this original engagement with the ancient problem of literary genres, Enzo Melandri begins by asking why literary genres exist in the first place. His investigation extends beyond literary history, as important as it is, to become a philosophical inquiry into the limits of language and the strategies language must employ to register the impossibility of fully grasping its relation to the world. In this light, tragedy, comedy, epic, elegy, and so on emerge as the musical and emotional traces language bears from its encounter with its own limits.