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- Volume 6, 2020
Annual Review of Linguistics - Volume 6, 2020
Volume 6, 2020
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Language and Masculinities: History, Development, and Future
Vol. 6 (2020), pp. 409–434More LessIn the past two decades, the field of language and masculinities studies has become an established part of language, gender, and sexuality research, growing in response to concerns about the limited criticality directed toward men and masculinities in sociolinguistics. In doing so, the field has added to the conceptual and theoretical tool kit of sociolinguistics, furthering both our understanding of the linguistic strategies used by men in a variety of contexts and the myriad links connecting language and the social performance of gender. This review surveys the historical trajectory of scholarship broadly concerned with men, masculinities, and language and charts its development from more critical work on men and masculinities within sociology to its emergence as an independent field of inquiry. I outline some of the key contributions this body of work has made to sociolinguistic theory, methodology, and knowledge and suggest some future research directions through which the field may engage with contemporary social issues.
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Linguistic Perspectives on Register
Vol. 6 (2020), pp. 435–455More LessLanguage users change their written and spoken language according to the situational characteristics and communicative purpose of production—that is, according to the register being produced. Research on registers has focused on register description or patterns of register variation, on detailed analysis of individual linguistic features or an account for the use of a broad range of linguistic features, and on the distinction between written and spoken registers. In this review, we survey register studies according to the register being investigated: spoken, written, electronic/online, literary, or historical. This survey also shows that recent register studies have focused on more specialized written and spoken domains and that the use of corpus linguistics tools and advanced statistical methods such as multidimensional analysis has allowed for broad analyses of the language used in different registers. Finally, we point to areas of register research that need further investigation.
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Fantastic Linguistics
Vol. 6 (2020), pp. 457–468More LessMany nonlinguists believe that their ability to speak at least one language provides special insight into the essence of languages and their histories. One result of this belief is a plethora of theories about language from a surprising variety of perspectives: where particular languages (or all languages) originated, which languages are related by a shared history, how undeciphered writings or pseudowritings are to be read, how language figures in paranormal claims as “evidence” for reincarnation and channeled entities, and much, much more. This review surveys some of the major areas in which fringe and crackpot claims about language thrive. Only a few topics and examples can be covered in the limited space of a single article, but these should be enough, we hope, to suggest the range of wonderfully wacky pseudolinguistic notions out there.
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