Just about everyone seems to have views about language. Language attitudes and language ideologies permeate our daily lives. Our competence, intelligence, friendliness, trustworthiness, social status, group memberships, and so on, are often judged from the way we communicate.

Even the speed at which we speak can evoke reactions. And we often try to anticipate such judgements as we communicate. In this lively introduction, Peter Garrett draws upon research carried out over recent decades in or...

Disasters and History offers the first comprehensive historical overview of hazards and disasters. Drawing on a range of case studies, including the Black Death, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the Fukushima disaster, the authors examine how societies dealt with shocks and hazards and their potentially disastrous outcomes. They reveal the ways in which the consequences and outcomes of these disasters varied widely not only between societies but also within the same societies according to so...

Becoming a Reader argues that, whatever our individual differences of personality and background, there is a regular sequence of attitudes we go through as we mature, which affect how we experience fiction, from the five-year-old child absorbed in the world of fantasy play, through the seventeen year old critical seeker of the truth, to the middle-aged reader recognizing their own experiences in fictional characters. Becoming a Reader argues that this sequence of responses can be worked out a...

This is the first full-length biography in more than fifty years of Immanuel Kant, one of the giants amongst the pantheon of Western philosophers as well as the one with the most powerful and broad influence on contemporary philosophy. It is well known that Kant spent his entire life in an isolated part of Prussia living the life of a typical university professor. This has given rise to the view that Kant was a pure thinker with no life of his own, or at least none worth considering seriously.

In this biography, Manfred Kuehn debunks that myth once and for all. Taking account of the most recent scholarship Professor Kuehn allows the reader (whether interested in philosophy, history, politics, German culture, or religion) to follow the same journey that Kant himself took in emerging as a central figure in modern philosophy...

This is the first textbook to focus exclusively on issues of distributive justice on the global scale. It gives clear and up-to-date accounts of the major theories of global justice and spells out their significance for a series of political issues, including climate change, international trade, human rights and migration.

Contemporary China appears both deceptively familiar and inexplicably different. China is a cauldron of forms of entrepreneurship, social organization, ways of life and governance that are at once new and unique, recognizably Chinese and generically modern. In analyzing and interpreting these developments, Frank N.

Pieke adopts a China-centric perspective to move beyond western preoccupations, desires, or fears. Each chapter starts with a key question about China, showing that such questions ...

Delivering fundamental insights into the most popular methods of molecular analysis, this text is an invaluable resource for students and researchers. It encompasses an extensive range of spectroscopic and spectrometric techniques used for molecular analysis in the life sciences, especially in the elucidation of the structure and function of biological molecules. Covering the range of up-to-date methodologies from everyday mass spectrometry and centrifugation to the more probing X-ray crystal...

This Element takes stock of the current state of the global climate change regime, illuminating scope for policymaking and mobilizing collective action through networked governance at all scales, from the sub-national to the highest global level of political assembly.

This book describes the ways in which politicians, church leaders, generals, leaders of national movements and others try to influence our use of language. Professor Cooper argues that language planning is never attempted for its own sake. Rather it is carried out for the attainment of nonlinguistic ends such as national integration, political control, economic development, the pacification of minority groups, and mass mobilization.

Many examples are discussed, including the revival of Hebrew...

Social theory is the theoretical core of the social sciences, clearly distinguishable from political theory and cultural analysis. This book offers a unique overview of the development of social theory from the end of the Second World War in 1945 to the present day. Spanning the literature in English, French and German, it provides an excellent background to the most important social theorists and theories in contemporary sociological thought, with crisp summaries of the main books, arguments...