Full Description
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 fulfil their communicative potential. Contexts of Accommodation will appeal to researchers and advanced students in language and communication sciences, as well as to sociolinguists, anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists.
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.
