Bloomsbury Linguistics

Friday: Clear Out

So, the time has come.  It's time to clear out the office on York Road.  Out go the paper stacks, the paper clips, the paper piles and the books.  Red dots for charity shop, boxes for the Archive and a huge spreadsheet of returns to the warehouse.  Memories exist in the most mundane things: my birthday card signed by good friends no longer at the company, my stack of appraisals and interview forms, my budget reports from 06-07.  I throw a lot away, quickly: sentimentality means you hold back, hold on to things.  A pile of empty red folders builds up; these folders once contained ideas for books.  In the spirit of moving forward, we're to be Bloomsbury Academic Linguistics.  I consolidate my training notes and look around at the other people in the office.  Someone suggests we put the radio on and I get some speakers from somewhere so that the tinny laptop speakers don't drive us all around the bend.

Simple Minds have a song called "Book of Brilliant Things" and as I leaf through the backlist, I note the highlights and the surprises.   "I open up to take a look/into the bright and shining book" runs the lyric and whilst a monograph might not set your world on fire, each of these was a labour and some of these books were real labours of love.  Each of them makes us proud to publish linguistics and to be one of the most successful lists around - because of a dedicated team producing great books, with great covers and sensitive marketing.

The Simple Minds album ticks over to the next track, which contains the lyric, "love to feel the paths in motion" and linguistics and the science of language is surely about taking a good look at one of the motive forces of our world.  That of discourse, the energy and crackle of communication, human to human, across a room, across a continent, across a globe, symbols scratched and etched on paper and tapped onto a screen.

Here's to the next phrase, then.  Or should that be phase?  Who can tell.

GM.

The Times Higher Education Textbook Guide

I am delighted to kick off our first blog post with the news that two of our textbooks have been recommended in the Times Higher Education 'Textbook Guide', published last week.

An Introduction to Sociolinguistics: Society and Identity by Sharon K. Deckert and Caroline H. Vickers is a definitive introductory text to modern sociolinguistics that looks at the study of language and society through the concept of identity. Deckert and Vickers adopt an interdisciplinary approach, introducing work from a variety of fields that examine sociolinguistic data, from linguistics to anthropology, sociology, psychology and education. It includes student-friendly features that make the book ideal for teaching with, including key terms, chapter summaries, study questions and further reading.

An Introduction to Conversation Analysis is a second edition of one of our best-selling textbooks by Anthony J. Liddicoat. This book looks at methodology, motivation and the specifics of transcription, and is essential reading for undergraduate and graduate students in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, sociology and applied linguistics courses. The chapters introduce every aspect of conversation analysis in a logical, step-by-step examination, including coverage of transcription, turn-taking, sequence organisation, repair, and storytelling. This book is also accompanied by a companion website with additional online resources and material.

You can read the Language and Linguistics 'Textbook Guide' in full, here.

Both of these textbooks are available on inspection for lectueres in the UK and overseas. If you would like to request a copy of either, or both, please visit our website.

Jenny

Marketing Executive