This book is one of the first applications of a functional approach to language across time. It first summarizes and evaluates previous studies of the development of scientific language, including Halliday's exploration of this fascinating topic.

First published in Great Britain in 1973, Main Trends in the Science of Language was part of a series of books that resulted from a study carried out by UNESCO in collaboration with national and international research centres in the social sciences, as well as with groups of individual scholars. The book examines the position of linguistics in the years surrounding the publication of the book before considering the subject’s potential, future development. It looks at linguistic vistas, the place of linguistics among the sciences of man and linguistics and natural sciences. This book will be of interest to the educated reader, research workers, and professional associations as well as to national and international institutions that organize, plan and finance scientific research.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.

Non-Aboriginal material.

This book investigates the role of the Latin language as a vehicle for science and learning from several angles. First, the question what was understood as ‘science’ through time and how it is named in different languages, especially the Classical ones, is approached. Criteria for what did pass as scientific are found that point to ‘science’ as a kind of Greek Denkstil based on pattern-finding and their unbiased checking. In a second part, a brief diachronic panorama introduces schools of thought and authors who wrote in Latin from antiquity to the present. Latin’s heydays in this function are clearly the time between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries. Some niches where it was used longer are examined and reasons sought why Latin finally lost this lead-role. A third part seeks to define the peculiar characteristics of scientific Latin using corpus linguistic approaches. As a result, several types of scientific writing can be identified. The question of how to transfer science from one linguistic medium to another is never far: Latin inherited this role from Greek and is in turn the ancestor of science done in the modern vernaculars. At the end of the study, the importance of Latin science for modern science in English becomes evident.

An introductory linguistics textbook that takes a novel approach: studying linguistic semantics as an exercise in scientific theory construction. This introductory linguistics text takes a novel approach, one that offers educational value to both linguistics majors and nonmajors. Aiming to help students not only grasp the fundamentals of the subject but also engage with broad intellectual issues and develop general intellectual skills, Semantics as Science studies linguistic semantics as an exercise in scientific theory construction. Semantics offers an excellent medium through which to acquaint students with the notion of a formal, axiomatic system—that is, a system that derives results from a precisely articulated set of assumptions according to a precisely articulated set of rules. The book develops semantic theory through the device of axiomatic T-theories, first proposed by Alfred Tarski more than eighty years ago, introducing technical elaboration only when required. It adopts Japanese as its core object of study, allowing students to explore and investigate the real empirical issues arising in the context of non-English structures, a non-English lexicon and non-English meanings. The book is structured as a laboratory science text that poses specific empirical questions, with 25 short units, each of which can be covered in one class session. The layout is engagingly visual, designed to help students understand and retain the material, with lively illustrations, examples, and quotations from famous scholars.