num_pages: 256
description: This engagingly written, highly readable volume introduces lay readers to the fascinating world of language. Replete with jokes, anecdotes, quotations, and readily intelligible examples, it offers a painless entree to the full range of linguistic knowledge. In thirty-one brief chapters,Macaulay delves into such topics as language acquisition, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, social dialects, sex differences, writing, style, register, conversation, narrative, swearing, rhetoric, second language learning, and linguistic change. The reader comes away with a new appreciationof the pleasure to be derived from the study of this complex and uniquely human phenomenon.
language: English
title: The Social Art: Language and Its Uses
titlecomplete: The Social Art: Language and Its Uses
genres: Nonfiction, Reference, Linguistics
ratings_count: 28
publisher: Oxford University Press