Chapter 4 describes how living systems are organised at the molecular level, beginning with the chemistry of carbon-based systems and the concept of emergent properties. The genetic code and the flow of information are introduced as a key central theme, and the structure of DNA and RNA is presented. An outline of gene structure and organisation in prokaryotes and eukaryotes is followed by the description of transcription and translation as the mechanisms by which genes are expressed. A broader look at how genomes are organised leads to an outline of the transcriptome and proteome as two important concepts that are key to understanding how the genome functions in adaptive and developmental contexts.

This chapter offers a reassessment of the contemporary feminist legacies of the late surrealist novel. Historically, scholarship has reached a moment where the late surrealist novels of Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) and Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012) now operate as active intertexts. Such legacies have become manifest in a new generation of contemporary novelists who identify as feminist: Chloe Aridjis (b. 1971), Kate Bernheimer (b. 1966), Ali Smith (b. 1962), and Heidi Sopinka (b. 1971). A range of feminist-surrealist stylistics in the contemporary novel become apparent. Self-reflexive framing devices such as transcription (daydreaming) and lecturing (epistemology) enable protagonists to take control of their voice or destiny in Bernheimer’s The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold (2001), Aridjis’s Book of Clouds (2009), and Smith’s Autumn (2016). Moreover, haunted texts and found objects serve as catalysts and/or disruptive plot devices in Sopinka’s The Dictionary of Animal Languages (2018) and Aridjis’s Asunder (2013) and Sea Monsters (2019). These novels mimic the surrealist techniques and the elderly characters found in Tanning’s Abyss/Chasm (1977/2004) and Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet (1974). A comparative, intergenerational perspective ensures the historical authenticity of the surrealist novel, and acknowledges a critical inheritance of fictional, revisionary accounts of the avant-garde movement.

Evolution is responsible for all biological diversity on earth, so it is critical that the students understand precisely what evolution is and how we know that evolution is a fact. In this chapter the four causes of evolutionary change in populations are reviewed in some detail, relying partially on the lessons on genetics in Chapter 5. It particularly emphasizes evidence in the modern world for evolution, such as the evolution of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria, but also patterns seen in extant vertebrates documented in locations of significant environmental change over the last 200 years. This chapter also reviews the history of the discovery of evolution, and the intellectual antecedents that allowed Darwin to make his inference. It explores the appearance of the scientific worldview during the Renaissance and Enlightenment and how that worldview challenged (and continues to challenge) some religious and secular authorities.

Starting with the observation that the word translation has its etymological roots, as does metaphor, in notions of space, this chapter attempts to revivify the relevance of the notion of space in translation, by relating it to the space that typically is occupied by textual editors. It takes the example principally of Samuel Beckett: looking at examples from his own translation practice as well as his attitudes towards that practice; looking at the work of scholarly editing that went into the four-volume edition of his letters; and questioning the role of the editor who has traditionally been seen as ideally invisible and authoritative. The various stages that go into the making of such an edition – transcription, translation, selection, annotation – are revealed to be reluctant to conform to the notional ideal of the editor’s transparency.

This brief introduction flags up the problems of song recovery from eras before the advent of music publishing and mechanical recording. It pits assumptions of European colonial superiority against the voices and musical practices of America’s Indigenous people, from the Inuits of Alaska to the Aztecs of Mexico.

This chapter provides an introductory coverage of the major issues involved in designing and executing sociolinguistic research with a focus on spoken Arabic in natural settings. It explains the concept of the observer’s paradox and suggests methods to reduce its effects in sociolinguistic interviews. It covers ethnographic, qualitative, and quantitative methods. The use of dependent and independent variables is explained in detail, with a focus on age as a social variable. The chapter ends with ethical considerations as an integral part of research and research conduct.

Learning sciences researchers study different types of collaboration, study it for different reasons, and use a variety of methods. Many of these methods focus on talk and interaction patterns, often using a methodology called interaction analysis that builds on linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics. This chapter reviews four broad approaches: collaboration as a window onto individual learning; collaboration as a way to study how to help students learn better; collaboration as a way to study how collaboration changes during learning; and collaboration itself as a form of learning. These approaches differ along four dimensions: the unit of analysis for describing collaborative processes; the unit of analysis for documenting learning outcomes; the degree to which those learning outcomes are identified within the collaboration or outside the collaboration; and the degree to which the researcher considers some forms of collaboration to be more effective.

This chapter addresses the bidirectional interface between phonetics and speech-language therapy/pathology, focusing on the application of phonetic principles and methods within the clinical domain. The history of clinical phonetics as a phonetic subdomain is charted, including the birth of the extensions to the IPA for disordered speech (extIPA). Three critical issues are touched on: the complexities of the phonetics/phonology interface in discussing disordered speech; the related clinical application of different levels of transcription; and how advancing technologies are enabling clinical phoneticians to better understand the implications of clinical conditions for speech perception and production. In discussing a range of clinical populations and affected speech subsystems, it highlights some of the salient phonetic features explored in recent years and insights gained from different instrumental methods. Best practice for teaching and learning is described in the context of the professional training objective of most clinical phonetics programmes, and future directions of clinical phonetics are hypothesised in terms of the evolving technological and clinical landscapes.

Vowels are traditionally viewed as one of the two major classes of speech sound. Vowels lack contact between the tongue and the roof of the mouth, and they are normally voiced. Importantly, the speaker receives little proprioceptive feedback from their speech organs, meaning that it is not fully appropriate to define a vowel in terms of place and manner of articulation. Instead, tongue height and advancement are used to describe vowel quality, and auditory features play a more important role in description, e.g. with reference to the Cardinal Vowels system. Vowel categories form a continuum, and this has repercussions in terms of articulatory, auditory and acoustic overlap between contrastive categories and the special role that vowel gradience plays in dialect variation and language change. Other features of vowels stem from the general openness of vocalic articulations. For example, in principle, lip rounding can be combined with any tongue position, and nasality too demonstrates specific patterns that have both phonetic and phonological dimensions. Vowel quantity, or duration, is also used in differing ways by different languages, both phonemically and allophonically.

Phonetics is studied by students on a variety of courses, where it may be either elective or obligatory, and its inclusion in the syllabus can be implicit or explicit. In all cases, however, the teaching of phonetics must take into account the needs of students in relation to the rest of their programme, and the use they will make of phonetics in their further studies or work. Here we focus on the explicit teaching of phonetics, as experienced by students of, for example, linguistics and speech and language therapy. We consider key issues in teaching and learning across all aspects of phonetics, including theory, ear-training and production, transcription of segments and prosodic features, and acoustics. The chapter is underpinned by both phonetics research, where it exists, and that from broader educational research and theoretical perspectives. Finally, we consider future directions for the teaching of phonetics, mapping this against the United Kingdom Professional Standards Framework for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.

Once presented the interactional perspective on sensoriality proposed by this book (Chapter 1), Chapter 2 offers a methodology able to document and to analyze embodied sensory engagements in social interaction. It discusses fieldwork, video-recordings, and multimodal transcriptions, as well as alternate approaches, showing the coherence and adequacy of a video and multimodal methodology for studying multisensoriality. It also presents the empirical case that will be developed in the book, focusing on food as an exemplary field in which all the senses play a crucial role. It presents the field of study, an exemplary activity in which participants sensorially engage with food: practices of looking, touching, smelling, and tasting cheese in gourmet shops. The empirical data on which the remaining of the book is based are video-recordings of shop encounters between cheese sellers and customers, gathered in a dozen of cities in Europe, drawing on a dozen of different languages. This unique and rich corpus of video data enables to develop a systematic analysis of the detailed way in which it is possible, within a praxeological, interactional, multimodal approach, to study multisensoriality in action.

Chapter 4 describes the composition of the self-compiled data base for the study, which consists of two comparable data sets of authentic recordings of Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) from 1978–1988 (audio) and 2003–2013 (video) as well of the respective Hansard files. It outlines how the language-external processes which have changed the interaction at PMQs between 1978–2013 provide the backdrop against which the evolution of reported speech is analysed. Specifically, it is argued that the composition of participation in the activity at PMQs has changed in correlation with the more prominent role of the Leader of the Opposition, and fostered a sharp increase of reported speech. It is demonstrated how the calculation of frequencies is conducted in relation to turn types and speaker roles. The chapter finally presents the transcription conventions and procedure, and discusses the basic methodological assumptions of the study.

Chapter 3 describes the fundamental research questions, empirical approaches and findings of language documentation and descriptive linguistics. These are two closely interrelated linguistic subfields concentrating on the collection and/or analysis of primary data for the purposes of documenting and describing languages (corpora and grammars). Methodological issues include considerations on research objects, fieldwork, as well as techniques and procedures of data collection, editing, and analysis such as transcription, annotation, and elicitation. The chapter ends with recommendations for further reading and a list of short exercises and ideas for small research projects.

My third chapter investigates the use of tape recording as a mode of composition for late-modernists Jack Kerouac (Visions of Cody) and William S. Burroughs (The Ticket That Exploded). For Kerouac, the impulse was toward improvisatory transcription, but for Burroughs, tape was an integral part of his notorious “cut-up method.” I focus on the emergence of commercially available tape recording technologies in the 1950s and 1960s, which enabled amateurs to record as well as edit, loop, and manipulate recordings in other imaginative ways. In both novels that I explore, tapes play a key role within the plot; but they were also employed in the construction of the texts. As friends and collaborators with largely different approaches to tape, Kerouac and Burroughs demonstrate how the transformation of agency from consumer to producer of recordings shifted the ways writers imagined their literary projects.

Given the increasingly important role that music, especially jazz, played in the American literary soundscape, my second chapter explores two instances of jazz autobiography: Alan Lomax’s Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and “Inventor of Jazz” (1950) and Sidney Bechet’s Treat It Gentle (1960). Through my analysis, I reveal the critical intervention of Zora Neale Hurston in shaping the practices of transcription so that the voices represented on the page adhere to the “laws of sound.” While the tendency has been to read Lomax and Bechet’s books in the context of popular jazz autobiography, I argue that the avant-garde nature of their transcription practices warrant their consideration alongside more canonical works of modernist prose. These books are not oral histories but rather aural histories that require readers to think critically about the sonic identities of musicians who themselves experimented with recording technology.

In this chapter, we consider what methods and research in conversation analysis (CA), which examines the systematic accomplishment of action in its natural ecological contexts, can bring to sociopragmatics. While CA shares some of its methods with some other approaches in pragmatics – including its data-driven focus – we begin by first focusing on two aspects of the CA method that make it distinct from other approaches to language use: transcription and collections. We then go on to illustrate through two case studies how CA methods and research can help us leverage open areas of ongoing interest in sociopragmatics. The first case study focuses on (im)politeness and speech acts, while the second focuses on inference, identity and relationships. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the intersection between CA and sociopragmatics and possible directions for future research.

This chapter details how data are gathered, analyzed, and debated in a way which distinguishes citizen sociolinguistics from typical social science methodology, exemplifying and discussing several distinctions: The tools used to gather data are often misuses of other data tools like dialect surveys, language quizzes, or Google Translate; objective “accuracy” is less important than “likes” or popularity; sharing data is commonplace and necessary, given the importance of popularity for validity; transcripts are not kept in a locked drawer, but openly circulated; transcription of talk (often using phonetic spelling, emojis, or creative punctuation) is not “accurate” or “inaccurate” but is a form of interpretation in itself; making friends with research participants is not creepy overstepping but the essence of citizen sociolinguistic inquiry and a serendipitous way in which findings are disseminated. Validity, then, is built through participation in this community, rather than appeal to another knowledge base (such as published academic research). This chapter concludes with a short guide for fostering and exploring everyday conversations about language, whether fomented by curiosity and wonderment or critique and arrest.

In order to become more effective communicators, we need to understand how participants, their cultural and intercultural selves, values, motivations, language knowledge, and language use, among other factors, shape interactions. We can improve our understanding by analyzing interactions both in the L1 and L2. Systematic data analysis reveals how different layers of culture – the supranational, national, regional, cultural group-based, local, and individual factors – contribute to the interaction (Bonvillain, 2020; Oetzel, 2009; Saville-Troike, 2003). It also allows us to see which aspects of culture are most salient – relevant and impactful – in a particular situation. To help readers – and their learners – develop the necessary skills, this chapter presents three models for analyzing communication as a culturally situated process: the ethnography of communication, interactional sociolinguistics, and multimodal analysis. Instructors can implement these analytic approaches in the classroom, using various sources of authentic data, to help students learn to understand communication in culturally and situationally appropriate ways.

This chapter situates the research in a mixed method framework with ethnography at the core. Ethnography emphasises that contexts for communication should be investigated rather than assumed and that the detailed analysis of linguistic data is essential to understanding its significance. It has been claimed that this informal knowledge about what can be said to whom, and how, has been overlooked in political accounts of institutions because mainstream comparative research in this area tends to analyse formal rules. Some of the complexities of conducting linguistic ethnographic work in institutions are: gaining access to research sites; researching powerful, elite participants and the viability of using the the readily available Official Reports as data. The ethnographic approach including ethnographic interviews and observations in situ in different parliaments, is combined with applied Conversation Analysis (CA). Gaining the floor has been viewed by analysts as a competitive economy and this is particularly apt for the highly regulated debate floor where turns are sought for professional and political gain. I also explain how Critical Discourse Analysis is used to assist the identification of gendered discourses relating to gendered linguistic stereotypes.