Contexts of Accommodation: Developments in Applied Sociolinguistics

by Howard Giles, Justine Coupland, Nikolas Coupland

Overview

The theory of accommodation is concerned with motivations underlying and consequences arising from ways in which we adapt our language and communication patterns toward others. Since accommodation theory's emergence in the early l970s, it has attracted empirical attention across many disciplines and has been elaborated and expanded many times. In Contexts of Accommodation, accommodation theory is presented as a basis for sociolinguistic explanation, and it is the applied perspective that predominates this edited collection. The book seeks to demonstrate how the core concepts and relationships invoked by accommodation theory are available for addressing altogether pragmatic concerns. Accommodative processes can, for example, facilitate or impede language learners' proficiency in a second language as well as immigrants' acceptance into certain host communities; affect audience ratings and thereby the life of a television program; affect reaction to defendants in court and hence the nature of the judicial outcome; and be an enabling or detrimental force in allowing handicapped people to fulfill their communicative potential.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521369602
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	02/25/2010
Series:	Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	332
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

Table of Contents

List of contributors; 1. Accommodation theory: communication, context and consequence Howard Giles, Nikolas Coupland and Justine Coupland; 2. Audience accommodation in the mass media Allan Bell; 3. Accommodation on trial: processes of communicative accommodation in courtroom interaction Per Linell; 4. Accommodation in medical consultations Richard L. Street, Jr; 5. Accommodation and mental disability Heidi E. Hamilton; 6. Accommodation in therapy Kathleen Ferrara; 7. Accommodation in native-nonnative interactions: going beyond the 'what' to the 'why' in second-language research Jane Zuengler; 8. Interethnic accommodation: the role of norms Cynthia Gallois and Victor J. Callan; 9. Organisational communication and accommodation: toward some conceptual and empirical links Richard Y. Bourhis; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"This volume, edited by three of the major researchers in accommodation theory, has much to offer a variety of readers." Karen Adams, American Anthropologist

From the Publisher