Languages in Action

Book excerpt: This book includes a selection of papers in linguistics presented at the 14th Conference on British and American Studies. Its tripartite structure reflects the main topics around which the nineteen contributions cluster. The first part, “Native language profiling: explorations and findings”, displays a variety of methodological approaches aimed at highlighting syntactic, morphological, and lexico-semantic aspects of, primarily, English and Romanian. The papers in the second section, “Aspects of language change, bilingualism, and cross-linguistic variation”, bring to the fore some of the topical issues falling within the ambit of language contact, such as mixed languages, bilingualism, and code-switching, as well as contrastive investigations of language structure. The research strand in the final part, “Meaning and communication within and across cultures”, relates to lexico-pragmatic inquiries into the construction of meaning, focusing on the “language beyond language”, as well as on the extent to which the lexical and pragmatic repertoires of various languages can be made to overlap.