Efnisyfirlit

• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Talking to Garfield
• 3 Did I hear that right?
• Letters and sounds
• Phonetics (actual sounds) and phonemics (the idea of those sounds)
• Traversing the phonetic–phonemic divide
• Words together, words apart
• Word pastimes
• Spoonerisms
• Malapropisms
• Mondegreens
• 4 Twisted words
• Prefixes, suffixesaffixes
• Compound words
• Clipping old words and growing new ones
• Idioms
• Reduplication
• Brands and generics
• Sound-alikes, spell-alikes, and shades of meaning
• Bushisms and Steven Colbertisms
• 5 Fitting words together
• Structural ambiguity and the grouping of words in a sentence
• Verbs and their objects
• Using (and misusing) pronouns
• All the monkeys are not in the zoo and other semantic ambiguities
• 6 Meaning one thing and saying another
• Deixis
• Direct vs. indirect speech
• Speech acts and performatives
• Cooperative Principles of conversation
• Presupposition
• 7 Fitting the pieces together
• Structure
• Repetition
• Pronouns
• Known to new information
• Conceptual patterns
• Conversational structure
• Context
• Whos talking to whom
• Speakers
• Listeners
• The where and when of discourse
• The channels of discourse
• Genre
• Genres in general
• Genres of humor
• 8 “Kids say the darndest things”
• The development of phonology (speech sounds)
• The development of word meaning
• Syntactic development
• A guide to “caregiver speech” (how adults talk to children)
• A final word: child language acquisition, television, and parenting styles
• 9 Variety is the spice of life
• Types of varieties
• How varieties sound
• Variable vocabularies
• Variable grammars
• Variable uses and style-switching
• 10 Cross-cultural gaffes
• Pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar
• Conversational misfires
• 11 The language police
• Soft enforcement: standardization and grammatical correctness
• Hard enforcement: language and politics
• Offensive speech and using humor to evade enforcement
• 12 So long, and thanks for all the fish…
• Notes
• Glossary
• Index