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Books in Social sciences

The Social Sciences collection forms a definitive resource for those entering, researching, or teaching in any of the many disciplines making up this interdisciplinary area of study. Written by experts and researchers from both Academic and Commercial domains, titles offer global scope and perspectives.

Key subject areas include: Library and Information Science; Transportation; Urban Studies; Geography, Planning, and Development; Security; Emergency Management.

  • Language Processing in Social Context

    • 1st Edition
    • Volume 54
    • R. Dietrich + 1 more
    • English
    The book presents an interdisciplinary analysis of social, cognitive, situational and contextual aspects of language and language processing by first and second language speakers. Linguists and psychologists formulate theoretical models and empirical analyses of the influence of such factors on various levels of language processing. These relate specifically to syntactic and semantic parsing, lexical selection, and text production. The issue of ``hearer orientation'' in language use lies at the forefront of interest in this anthology and is tackled from such different fields as linguistics, text linguistics, formal semantics, social psychology, psychology of language, artificial intelligence, and second language acquisition.
  • Dialect and Language Variation

    • 1st Edition
    • English
    This anthology emphasizes dialects of American English and language variation in America. The editors present original essays by today's leading investigators, including articles by some of Europe's best dialectologists, obtained expressly for this work.
  • The Aesthetic in Education

    • 1st Edition
    • M. Ross
    • English
    Features papers presented at one of Exeter University's Annual Creative Arts Summer Schools, together with especially solicited material. Contributors have focussed on the idea of the aesthetic as a special dimension of education, and the volume embraces a wide range of perspectives - philosophical accounts of the arts, aesthetics and creativity, multicultural education, the sociology of art, and the arts in further education.
  • The Learning Society Revisited

    • 1st Edition
    • Torsten Husen
    • English
    Torsten Husén has brought together in this volume a collection of his own essays, the topics of which reflect his long and distinguished career both as an academic and as a practical researcher. The essays are grouped under six main themes on which he has worked over the years: research and policy making; educational reforms; equality and meritocracy; the impact of education on career; international and comparative dimensions; and present trends and future perspectives. An underlying message running throughout the volume is the importance of examining educational problems from a wide social perspective, rather than solely from the narrow confines of the classroom.
  • Archaeology of Frontiers & Boundaries

    • 1st Edition
    • J J ROBINSON
    • English
    Archaeology of Frontiers and Boundaries presents a diverse set of case studies that addresses the basic questions concerning social change through the study of anthropological archaeology. This book discusses the methodological difficulties of modeling open systems. Organized into three parts encompassing 13 chapters, this book begins with an overview of the partial solution to assess the openness of human systems through the study of frontiers and boundaries. This text then presents a theoretical treatise on forager–farmer interaction using simulation experiments. Other chapters consider the hunter–gatherer settlement patterns as a response to local resource conditions. This book discusses as well the systemic views of cultural change adopted by archaeologists, which emphasize the processes underlying cultural change rather than the structure of the social units undergoing transformations. The final chapter deals with the relationship between behavior and modern material culture on the one hand, and variables of socioeconomic class and ethnicity on the other. This book is a valuable resource for archaeologists and anthropologists.
  • The Discourse of Negotiation

    Studies of Language in the Workplace
    • 1st Edition
    • A. Firth
    • English
    The study of negotiation has attracted considerable scholarly attention in recent decades, yet rarely have discourse analysts applied their particular concerns and interests to the phenomenon. Although a fundamental characteristic of negotiation is linguistic action, the detailed study of negotiation as a communicative, discourse activity is in its infancy. In the first collection of its kind, Alan Firth has brought together 14 original studies of negotiation discourse.Drawing on insights and methodologies from discourse and conversation analysis, pragmatics, ethnography and ethnomethodology, the book examines negotiations in a wide range of workplaces, including the US Federal Trade Commission, management-union meetings, doctors' surgeries, travel agencies, international trading houses in Denmark, Belgium and Australia, Swedish social welfare offices, and consumer helplines. Collectively, the book explores the notion of negotiation both as a formal encounter and as a gloss for more informal decision-making activities.Questions specifically addressed include: what is the interactional character of negotiation? How are negotiations related to the work context? And how are negotiations undertaken linguistically - as discourse-based activities? Answers are sought by utilising transcripts of real-life instances of negotiation. This allows for finely-detailed descriptions of the observed activities, providing important insight into the discourse-context relationship, the interactional bases of work acitivities, and the communicative processes of negotiation.
  • Hearing Science and Hearing Disorders

    • 1st Edition
    • M.E. Lutman
    • English
    Hearing Science and Hearing Disorders focuses on the nature of the processes in the inner ear and the nervous system that mediate hearing. Organized into eight chapters, this book first discusses the nature of speech communication, the extent of hearing problems, and the pathophysiology of hearing. Four core chapters follow, in which four areas of central importance to understanding hearing disorders and their effects are covered. These areas are assessment of auditory function, the scope for technological solutions, the nature of audio-visual speech perception, and the effects of deafness upon speech production. This book will be valuable to students; to academic and professional workers concerned with hearing, speech, and their disorders; and to scientifically or medically literate people in general.
  • Documents on the Holocaust

    Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland, and the Soviet Union
    • 1st Edition
    • Y. Arad + 2 more
    • English
    This volume presents a comprehensive collection of essential documents for students and laymen interested in the history of the Holocaust. The collection reflects both the major trends in Nazi ideology and policy towards the Jews and the behaviour and reaction of the Jews to the Nazi challenge. The book is divided into three geographical-politic... sections: Germany and Austria; Poland; and the Baltic countries and areas of the Soviet Union occupied by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Each section is preceded by a short introduction setting the documents against the background of events and developments in these areas.
  • Group Theory for Social Workers

    • 1st Edition
    • K. Heap
    • English
    Presents aspects of group theory from the disciplines of social and developmental psychology, small-group psychology, psycho-analytical theory and practice. The concepts discussed are chosen for their relevance to understanding the behavior of clients who are members of groups in social work treatment, and the book is extensively illustrated by case extracts from social work practice
  • Sociolinguistic Metatheory

    • 1st Edition
    • E. Figueroa
    • English
    Linguistics is a discipline with ever expanding boundaries and interests. Despite the narrow definition of linguistics which dominates academia, sub-fields continue to flourish and ways of doing linguistics continue to expand. As ways to do linguistics increase, and as approaches to linguistics accumulate over time, it becomes increasingly necessary for students of linguistics to have ways of understanding and comparing developments in linguistics.Sociolin... Metatheory is a book which explains foundational developments in linguistics by taking the past three decades of developments in sociolinguistics and relating them to contemporaneous developments in received linguistics. Sociolinguistic Metatheory takes the reader through the basic philosophical questions which drive linguistic research. It looks in detail at three models of sociolinguistics - Dell Hymes and the Ethnography of Communication, William Labov and Sociolinguistic Realism, and John Gumperz and Interactional Sociolinguistics - and focuses on such questions as: Where is language located? How is an utterance-based approach to linguistics different from a sentence-based approach? How do metatheoretical paradigm assumptions such as realism or relativism affect the development of linguistic theory? What interesting developments in linguistic theory and analysis have sociolinguistics provided?