Product Description: This volume contains functional approaches to the description of language and culture, and language and cultural change. The approaches taken by the authors range from cognitive approaches including Stratificational grammar to more socially oriented ones including Systemic Functional linguistics...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

This volume derives from a symposium held in March 1982, to celebrate the inauguration of the Department of Linguistics at Rice University. The focus of the symposium was the state of linguistics and semiotics in its recent past, the current status, and directions to be explored in the immediate future.