Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand spent nearly four years (in cloth and paper) on The New York Times Best Seller list and has sold over a million and a half copies. Clearly, Tannen's insights into how and why women and men so often misunderstand each other when they talk has touched a nerve. For years a highly respected scholar in the field of linguistics, she has now become widely known for her work on how conversational style differences associated with gender affect relationships. Her life work has demonstrated how close and intelligent analysis of conversation can reveal the extraordinary complexities of social relationships--including relationships between men and women. Now, in Gender and Discourse, Tannen has gathered together six of her scholarly essays, including her newest and previously unpublished work in which language and gender are examined through the lens of "sex-class-linked" patterns, rather than "sex-linked" patterns. These essays provide a theoretical backdrop to her best-selling books--and an informative introduction which discusses her field of linguistics, describes the research methods she typically uses, and addresses the controversies surrounding her field as well as some misunderstandings of her work. (She argues, for instance, that her cultural approach to gender differences does not deny that men dominate women in society, nor does it ascribe gender differences to women's "essential nature.") The essays themselves cover a wide range of topics. In one, she analyzes a number of conversational strategies--such as interruption, topic raising, indirection, and silence--and shows that, contrary to much work on language and gender, no strategy exclusively expresses dominance or submissiveness in conversation--interruption (or overlap) can be supportive, silence and indirection can be used to control. It is the interactional context, the participants' individual styles, and the interaction of their styles, Tannen shows, that result in the balance of power. She also provides a fascinating analysis of four groups of males and females (second-, sixth-, and tenth-grade students, and twenty-five year olds) conversing with their best friends, and she includes an early article co-authored with Robin Lakoff that presents a theory of conversational strategy, illustrated by analysis of dialogue in Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage. Readers interested in the theoretical framework behind Tannen's work will find this volume fascinating. It will be sure to interest anyone curious about the crucial yet often unnoticed role that language and gender play in our daily lives.

The aim of this book is to provide a succinct, accessible and comprehensive guide to linguistic concepts and names. 'Linguistic' here does not mean the technical terminology of linguistic sciences, but language in a more everyday sense. Terms are drawn from the various applied areas of language study, such as language teaching, speech pathology, stylistics, typography, and lexicography, as well as from core topics such as grammar, figures of speech, and basic phonetics. The dictionary sets out to answer questions people are likely to ask about language, such as 'Which language(s) do they speak in such-a-country' (all the countries of the world are included), and 'How many people speak X?' (several hundred languages are included). There are entries on 'knowledge about language', and 'LINC', and the ongoing developments in corpus compilation (COBUILD, British National Corpus). A great deal of background is given to the language profiles (e.g. early literary history). Pronunciations of language names (and of several other terms) are given. A small number of entries deal with linguistics, in particular the main schools of thought and basic concepts (e. g. competence, morphology). Abbreviations are included. In all, there are almost 2750 entries and there are c. 5000 cross-references, to give readers a wide range of access points to the information. Carefully chosen illustrations show things that cannot easily be expressed in text, such as alphabets. A selection of cartoons reinforces the author's conviction that language study can be fun.