From the Back Cover --

Boyd Davis, Bonnie E. Cone Professor in Applied Linguistics at UNC Charlotte, focuses on sociohistorical and comparative contexts for discourse, with an emphasis on medical, cognitive, and legal constraints on Q-A dialogue and conversational narrative, including synchronous and asynchronous online interaction. Her most recent study is Alzheimer Talk, Text and Context (London/NY: Palgrave).

Jeannine Carpenter is a PhD student in the Duke University /North Carolina State University cooperative program in English Sociolinguistics. Her research interests include regional dialects of American English, African American English, and conversational style.

Clare J. Dannenberg is associate professor of linguistics and Director of the Linguistics Speech Lab within the English Department at Virginia Tech. Her current work focuses on phonological language change with respect to issues of locality and globalization in Appalachia. She additionally works with American Indian and African American Vernacular English in the Southeast.

Kirk Hazen is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at West Virginia University. He focuses on linguistic explanations of sociolinguistic variation and general dialect trends of Southern and Appalachian English.

Heenam Park received her Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of Florida in 2005. Her primary research interests are in the areas of second language reading, foreign language anxiety, second language acquisition, and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). Currently, she is teaching at the Dept. of English Language and Literature at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, Korea.

Javier Rivas is assistant professor of Spanish in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures of East Carolina University. His research interests include comparative Spanish-English phonetics and grammar, linguistic typology and universals, linguistic ideologies, and the arbitrariness / iconicity of language.

Lisa Russell-Pinson is a former postdoctoral fellow in the Applied Linguistics Program at UNC Charlotte. Currently, she provides language consulting services to universities, community colleges, non-profits and educational publishers. Her research interests include English for specific purposes, medical discourse, health literacy, and corpus linguistics.

Daniel J. Smith is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Clemson University. His research interests include language contact, especially Spanish in contact with other languages, and language acquisition.