The English Language on Trial by John A Hawkins
Many lawsuits arise over disagreements about language and about the meanings of everyday words, phrases, and sentences. This book draws on over fifty cases involving disputed meanings in the American legal system where the author served as an expert witness or consultant, to explore the interaction between language and law. Stepping back from the legal specifics and their outcomes, it analyzes the disputes from the perspective of the language sciences, especially semantics and pragmatics, and language comprehension. It seeks to understand why, and in what areas of English grammar, lexis, and usage, they have arisen among speakers who do not normally miscommunicate and disagree like this. The cases involve contracts, patents, advertising, trademarks, libel, and defamation, and descriptive insights and methods from the language sciences are applied to each case to make explicit the meanings that speakers would normally assign to English.-
From Old English to Standard English
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Varieties of English
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A Course Book in English Grammar
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The Lesser-Known Varieties of English
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Gender Shifts in the History of English
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Constructional Change in English
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English Corpus Linguistics
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British or American English?
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Style
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English Comparative Correlatives
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Data-Intensive Investigations of English
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Lexicons of English Religion, 1380–1850
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Noun Phrase Complexity in English
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Borrowings in Informal American English
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Consonantal Sound Change in American English
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Grammar, Rhetoric and Usage in English
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Regional Variation in Written American English
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Preposition Placement in English
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The English Binominal Noun Phrase
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Singapore English
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Eighteenth-Century English
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Change in Contemporary English
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Learner Language, Discourse and Interaction
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Early Modern English Dialogues
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Late Modern English Syntax
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Standards of English
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English Compounds and their Spelling
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The Changing English Language
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Intensifiers in Late Modern English
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Analysing Older English
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Long-Vowel Shifts in English, c.10501700
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Developments in English
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Russian English
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The Comment Clause in English
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Listening to the Past
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The English Language in Canada
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Grammatical Complexity in Academic English
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Nineteenth-Century English
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The Morphology of English Dialects
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Spontaneous Spoken English
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Transforming Early English
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Medical Writing in Early Modern English
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New Zealand English
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Infinitival Complement Clauses in English
John A. Hawkins is Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at the University of California Davis and Emeritus Professor of English and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. His recent publications include Cross-linguistic Variation and Efficiency (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Criterial Features in L2 English (with Luna Filipovicì, Cambridge University Press, 2012).
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781009682824 |
| ISBN 10 | 1009682822 |
| Title | The English Language on Trial |
| Author | John A Hawkins |
| Series | Studies In English Language |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
| Year published | 2026-05-01 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |