Contributions from a wide range of related areas are assembled in this book: psycholinguistics, pragmatics, second language acquisition, syntax, text linguistics, sociolonguistics, as well as educational and applied linguistics. These contributions from leading researchers enable the applied linguist to keep up to date with current thinking in diverse fields. The editiorial introductions to the papers show how their contents relate to each other and discuss some of the practical implications for language teaching and language assessment.