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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Semantics (meaning) > Lexicography
Contact Linguistics is a critical investigation of what happens to
the grammars of languages when bilingual speakers use both their
languages in the same clause. It consolidates earlier insights and
presents the new theoretical and empirical work of a scholar whose
ideas have had a fundamental impact on the field. It also shows
that bilingual data offer a revealing window on the structure of
the language faculty. Carol Myers-Scotton examines the nature of
major contact phenomena, especially lexical borrowing, grammatical
convergence, codeswitching, first language attrition, mixed
languages, and the development of creoles. She argues forcefully
that types of contact phenomena often seen as separate in fact
result from the same processes and can be explained by the same
principles. Her discussion centers around two new models derived
from the Matrix Language Frame model, previously applied only to
codeswitching. One model recognizes four types of morphemes based
on their different patterns of distribution across contact
phenomena; its key hyothesis is that distribution depends on
differential access to the morphemes in the production process. The
other analyzes three levels of abstract lexical structure whose
splitting and recombination across languages in bilingual speech
explains many contact outcomes. This is an important volume, of
unusual relevance for theories of competence and performance and
vital for all those concerned with language contact. Carol
Myers-Scotton is a Carolina Distinguished Professor of Linguistics
at the University of South Carolina. She is a specialist in
language contact phenomena and sociolinguistics and has a special
interest in East and Southern African linguistics. In 1993, she
published two volumes on codeswitching, Social Motivations for
Codeswitching: Evidence from Africa, and Duelling Languages:
Grammatical Structure in Codeswitching (both OUP). She has also
edited a volume of essays on language and literature (OUP 1998) and
published many articles in her areas of interest.
The volume offers an up-to-date overview of the influence of
English on Italian, bringing together the linguistic and the
cultural dimensions. The history of language contact between Italy
and Anglo-American societies is the basis for understanding lexical
borrowing and for identifying the domains of vocabulary more
intensely affected in time. Drawing on previous research and on
existing lexicographic evidence, this book presents a typology of
borrowings based on a new, usage-based word list of Italian
Anglicisms which is part of a larger multilingual project (GLAD -
Global Anglicism Database). The topics covered are the number of
Anglicisms in Italian, their frequency in specialist fields and
registers, the blurred area between borrowing and the circulation
of international vocabulary, luxury loans and casuals. The book
rounds up with the cultural debate on English-only education, which
has recently stirred purist concerns, marking an attitudinal shift
of Italian from an 'open' to a 'protectionist' language towards
exogenous influences. This book is addressed primarily to scholars
and university students, but also to a lay audience of non-experts,
interested in the linguistic and cultural contacts between English
and Italian.
This monograph presents a contrastive-corpus analysis of the
semantic category of gratification. It takes as a case study the
verb reward and its various forms in Polish and in English, as
prototypical of the semantics of gratification. The study, set
predominantly in the framework of semantic syntax, and drawing from
the theory of valence and frame semantics, adopts a corpus-driven
and usage-based approach to language analysis. By exploring the
syntactic realization and distribution of arguments opened by the
predicates of gratification in the two languages, the book offers
new insights into language representation in English and Polish,
and addresses the combinatoricity of human thought and cognitive
mechanisms reflected in the lexicalization patterns of the
situation of rewarding.
This book includes twelve articles that present new research on the
Finnic and Baltic languages spoken in the southern and eastern part
of the Circum-Baltic area. It aims to elaborate on the various
contact situations and (dis)similarities between the languages of
the area. Taking an areal, comparative, or sociolinguistic
perspective, the articles offer new insights into the grammatical,
semantic, pragmatic, and textual patterns of different types of
predicates or nouns or consider the variation of grammatical
categories from a typological perspective. The qualitative analyses
find support in quantitative data collected from language corpora
or written sources, including those representing the less studied
varieties of the area.
Typically, books on evaluation in the second and foreign language
field deal with large programs and often result from large?scale
studies done by the authors. The challenge for ordinary second and
foreign language classroom teachers is that they must extrapolate
techniques or strategies for evaluation from a very large scale to
a much smaller scale, that of the course. At the same time,
classroom teachers are responsible for outcomes of their courses
and need to do evaluation on a scale and for needs of their
choosing. Evaluating Second Language Courses is designed for
classroom teachers who are dealing with a single course, and who
wish to understand and improve some aspect of their course.
The rich variety of the English vocabulary reflects the vast number
of words it has taken from other languages. These range from Latin,
Greek, Scandinavian, Celtic, French, Italian, Spanish, and Russian
to, among others, Hebrew, Maori, Malay, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese,
andYiddish. Philip Durkin's full and accessible history reveals
how, when, and why. He shows how to discover the origins of
loanwords, when and why they were adopted, and what happens to them
once they have been. The long documented history of English
includes contact with languages in a variety of contexts,
including: the dissemination of Christian culture in Latin in
Anglo-Saxon England, and the interactions of French, Latin,
Scandinavian, Celtic, and English during the Middle Ages; exposure
to languages throughout the world during the colonial era; and the
effects of using English as an international language of science.
Philip Durkin describes these and other historical inputs,
introducing the approaches each requires, from the comparative
method for the earliest period to documentary and corpus research
in the modern. The discussion is illustrated at every point with
examples taken from a variety of different sources. The framework
Dr Durkin develops can be used to explore lexical borrowing in any
language. This outstanding book is for everyone interested in
English etymology and in loanwords more generally. It will appeal
to a wide general public and at the same time offers a valuable
reference for scholars and students of the history of English.
This book explores the construct of language in use, specifically
as operationalised through different item types in the Austrian
Matura (school-leaving exam). Empirical research on some of these
item types is scarce. The author reports on a mixed-methods study.
The theoretical frameworks employed are Purpura's (2004) model of
language ability and Weir's (2005) socio-cognitive framework. The
findings suggest that the tasks under investigation assess
grammatical form and meaning at the sub-sentential and sentential
level. Different item types were also found to target different
elements of lexicogrammatical competence. The study contributes to
understanding the nature of language in use and sheds light on the
application of the socio-cognitive framework to the validation of
language in use tasks.
This book argues (a) that there is no principled way to distinguish
inflection and derivation and (b) that this fatally undermines
conventional approaches to morphology. Conceptual shortcomings in
the relation between derivational and lexically-derived word forms,
Andrew Spencer suggests, call into question the foundation of the
inferential-derivational approach. Prototypical instances of
inflection and derivation are separated by a host of intermediate
types of lexical relatedness, some discussed in the literature,
others ignored. Far from finding these an embarrassment Professor
Spencer deploys the wealth of types of relatedness in a variety of
languages (including Slavic, Uralic, Australian, Germanic, and
Romance) to develop an enriched and morphologically-informed model
of the lexical entry. He then uses this to build the foundations
for a model of lexical relatedness that is consistent with
paradigm-based models. Lexical Relatedness is a profound and
stimulating book. It will interest all morphologists,
lexicographers, and theoretical linguists more generally.
Atong is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Northeast India and
Bangladesh. In this dictionary, Seino van Breugel provides a
rigorous, well-illustrated and well-referenced lexical description
of the language, making this book of great interest and value to
general linguists, typologists, as well as area specialists and
cultural anthropologists. Comprising not only of an Atong-English,
but also an English-Atong dictionary, as well as semantic lexica,
this volume is one of the most thorough lexical descriptions of a
Bodo-Garo language to date. The grammatical lexica allow the reader
quick access to lists of members of the various Atong word classes,
collocations and idiomatic expressions. The grammatical compendium
makes this book self-contained, while its many references link it
to the rest of the author's corpus on the Atong language. The
appendix of photos not only provides visual illustrations to many
of the Atong dictionary entries, but also offers the reader a
glance at the physical environment in which the language is spoken.
An essential companion for IELTS writing instructors and students,
Developing Writing Skills for IELTS provides IELTS test-takers with
the necessary skills to succeed in the two academic writing tasks
in IELTS. Adopting an original exemplar-based writing instructional
approach, this text offers an in-depth and reader-friendly analysis
of the assessment standards of the two academic writing tasks in
IELTS. Authentic exemplars written by EFL university students are
included to illustrate high (Bands 8-9), average (Bands 6-7), and
low (Bands 4-5) performances in IELTS writing. Key Features: *
Diagrammatical representation of assessment standards of the two
academic writing tasks by experienced IELTS writing examiners and
instructors. * 100 writing questions modelled after the IELTS
format, designed by the authors, and categorised according to
question types and topics that emerge from an analysis of over 400
IELTS writing questions. * Over 100 writing exemplars by EFL
university students, accompanied by guided activities and suggested
answers. Designed as a classroom text, a resource for workshops and
consultations, or a self-study material, Developing Writing Skills
for IELTS: A Research-based Approach will support IELTS writing
instructors and test-takers with a variety of writing
proficiencies.
This book presents the current state of knowledge in the vibrant
and diverse field of vocabulary studies, reporting innovative
empirical investigations, summarising the latest research, and
showcasing topics for future investigation. The chapters are
organised around the key themes of theorising and measuring
vocabulary knowledge, formulaic language, and learning and teaching
vocabulary. Written by world-leading vocabulary experts from across
the globe, the contributions present a variety of research
perspectives and methodologies, offering insights from cutting-edge
work into vocabulary, its learning and use. The book will be
essential reading for postgraduate students and researchers
interested in the area of second language acquisition, with a
particular focus on vocabulary, as well as to those working in the
broader fields of applied linguistics, TESOL and English studies.
For teachers of English, connecting with non-native students can
pose significant problems, but communication technologies may offer
a viable solution. Cases on Communication Technology for Second
Language Acquisition and Cultural Learning provides educators with
valuable insight into methods and opportunities for using
technology to teach students learning a foreign language.
Theoretical and pragmatic cases illustrate teaching strategies and
methodologies, hardware and software development, administrative
concerns, and cross-cultural considerations with respect to
effective educational technologies. Educators and students, as well
as administrators and developers, will use this book to improve the
effectiveness of second language curricula across a variety of
intercultural perspectives.
Informed by theory, research, and classroom practice, the volume
provides a systematic overview of critical L2 writing issues.
Additionally, with the aim to support instruction across all levels
of education for Chinese speakers, this book introduces pre-service
and in-service teachers to new teaching ideas, techniques, and
practice.
Language learning is one of the most rapidly changing disciplines.
Along with changing perspectives in learning in the field of Second
Language Acquisition, information communication technology (ICT)
has also created many learning paths to assist the process of
learning a second language (L2). In such an ever-evolving
environment, teachers, researchers, and professionals of a diverse
number of disciplines need access to the most current information
about research on the field of computer-enhanced language
acquisition and learning.""Handbook of Research on
Computer-Enhanced Language Acquisition and Learning"" provides
comprehensive coverage of successful translation of language
learning designs utilizing ICT in practical learning contexts. This
authoritative reference source amasses research from over XX
authors from XX countries, offering researchers, scholars,
students, and professionals worldwide, access to the latest
knowledge related to research on computer-enhanced language
acquisition and learning.
A truly original book in every sense of the word, The Dictionary of
Obscure Sorrows poetically defines emotions that we all feel but
don't have the words to express, until now-from the creator of the
popular online project of the same name. Have you ever wondered
about the lives of each person you pass on the street, realizing
that everyone is the main character in their own story, each living
a life as vivid and complex as your own? That feeling has a name:
"sonder." Or maybe you've watched a thunderstorm roll in and felt a
primal hunger for disaster, hoping it would shake up your life.
That's called "lachesism." Or you were looking through old photos
and felt a pang of nostalgia for a time you've never actually
experienced. That's "anemoia." If you've never heard of these terms
before, that's because they didn't exist until John Koenig began
his epic quest to fill the gaps in the language of emotion. Born as
a website in 2009, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows has garnered
widespread critical acclaim, inspired TED talks, album titles,
cocktails, and even tattoos. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
"creates beautiful new words that we need but do not yet have,"
says John Green, bestselling author of The Fault in Our Stars. By
turns poignant, funny, and mind-bending, the definitions include
whimsical etymologies drawn from languages around the world,
interspersed with otherworldly collages and lyrical essays that
explore forgotten corners of the human condition-from "astrophe,"
the longing to explore beyond the planet Earth, to "zenosyne," the
sense that time keeps getting faster. The Dictionary of Obscure
Sorrows is for anyone who enjoys a shift in perspective, pondering
the ineffable feelings that make up our lives, which have far more
in common than we think. With a gorgeous package and beautifully
illustrated throughout, this is the perfect gift for creatives,
word nerds, and people everywhere.
Anybody with the chance of teaching English to Indonesian speakers
should have experienced difficulties when it comes to non-verbal
predicates and the placement of be. This volume looks at this
matter from a grammar competition perspective. An experiment
conducted in Bandar Lampung with Indonesian learners of English
identified specific error patterns. These patterns result from
grammar competition between the L1 Indonesian and the L2 English.
This work mainly deals with the influence of adverbs such as still
or already, and the category of the non-verbal predicate
(adjectival, nominal, preposition phrase). Although the main focus
of this work is in the field of language acquisition, this volume
also provides a detailed contrast between English and Indonesian
non-verbal predicates and the contrast of the English copula be and
the Indonesian copulas ada and adalah. The lingusitic description
is done in a generative DM-based approach. Thus, this volume does
not only provide new insights in the field language acquisiton, but
also in the generative description of Indonesian in general and
non-verbal predicates in particular.
New Directions in Second Language Pragmatics brings together
varying perspectives in second language (L2) pragmatics to show
both historical developments in the field, while also looking
towards the future, including theoretical, empirical, and
implementation perspectives. This volume is divided in four
sections: teaching and learning speech acts, assessing pragmatic
competence, analyzing discourses in digital contexts, and current
issues in L2 pragmatics. The chapters focus on various aspects
related to the learning, teaching, and assessing of L2 pragmatics
and cover a range of learning environments. The authors address
current topics in L2 pragmatics such as: speech acts from a
discursive perspective; pragmatics instruction in the foreign
language classroom and during study abroad; assessment of pragmatic
competence; research methods used to collect pragmatics data;
pragmatics in computer-mediated contexts; the role of implicit and
explicit knowledge; discourse markers as a resource for
interaction; and the framework of translingual practice. Taken
together, the chapters in this volume foreground innovations and
new directions in the field of L2 pragmatics while, at the same
time, ground their work in the existing literature. Consequently,
this volume both highlights where the field of L2 pragmatics has
been and offers cutting-edge insights into where it is going in the
future.
The Spanish Lexicon of Baseball: Semantics, Style, and Terminology
draws on nearly 7,000 published MLB game summaries to explore the
contours of baseball terminology in Spanish. Organized in a logical
sequence that corresponds to various aspects of baseball (field of
play, player positions, getting on base, types and modes of hits,
scoring, runs-batted-in, umpire involvement and calls, pitching,
and defense), the work combines narrative style and illustrative
examples with keen lexical analysis. The result is an entertaining
and informative volume that is neither folksy nor linguistically
overcomplicated.
The last two decades have alerted applied linguists and their
bureaucratic counterparts--those who make or advise government on
language policy--to the issue of dealing with language problems in
an accountable fashion. Why do these problems seem so intractable?
How is it that these problems have not yet satisfactorily been
solved? What is it that continues to drive the interest in this? To
the scholars from many parts of the world who have been invited to
discuss this anew in the proposed volume, it was evident that
language planners, policy makers and language managers do not know
just how much work there is for language teachers to do if all of
the academically desirable arrangements or policies proposed are to
be implemented successfully. Indeed, the challenge to implement
these at times ambitious plans of language policy makers is
normally much bigger than the policy makers estimate.
This volume presents the results of the largest ever language
attitude/motivation survey in second language studies. The research
team gathered data from over 13,000 Hungarian language learners on
three successive occasions: in 1993, 1999 and 2004. The examined
period covers a particularly prominent time in Hungary's history,
the transition from a closed, Communist society to a western-style
democracy that became a member of the European Union in 2004. Thus,
the book provides an 'attitudinal/motivational flow-chart'
describing how significant sociopolitical changes affect the
language disposition of a nation. The investigation focused on the
appraisal of five target languages - English, German, French,
Italian and Russian - and this multi-language design made it also
possible to observe the changing status of the different languages
in relation to each other over the examined 12-year period. Thus,
the authors were in an ideal position to investigate the ongoing
impact of language globalisation in a context where for various
political/historical reasons certain transformation processes took
place with unusual intensity and speed. The result is a unique
blueprint of how and why language globalisation takes place in an
actual language learning environment.
The Bible is one of the books that has aroused the most interest
throughout history to the present day. However, there is one topic
that has mostly been neglected and which today constitutes one of
the most emblematic elements of the visual culture in which we live
immersed: the language of colour. Colour is present in the biblical
text from its beginning to its end, but it has hardly been studied,
and we appear to have forgotten that the detailed study of the
colour terms in the Bible is essential to understanding the use and
symbolism that the language of colour has acquired in the
literature that has forged European culture and art. The objective
of the present study is to provide the modern reader with the
meaning of colour terms of the lexical families related to the
green tonality in order to determine whether they denote only color
and, if so, what is the coloration expressed, or whether, together
with the chromatic denotation, another reality inseparable from
colour underlies/along with the chromatic denotation, there is
another underlying reality that is inseparable from colour. We will
study the symbolism that/which underpins some of these colour
terms, and which European culture has inherited. This
lexicographical study requires a methodology that allows us to
approach colour not in accordance with our modern and abstract
concept of colour, but with the concept of the ancient civilations.
This is why the concept of colour that emerges from each of the
versions of the Bible is studied and compared with that found in
theoretical reflection in both Greek and Latin. Colour thus emerges
as a concrete reality, visible on the surface of objects,
reflecting in many cases, not an intrinsic quality, but their
state. This concept has a reflection in the biblical languages,
since the terms of colour always describe an entity (in this sense
one can say that they are embodied) and include within them a wide
chromatic spectrum, that is, they are mostly polysemic.
Structuralism through the componential analysis, although providing
interesting contributions, had at the same time serious
shortcomings when it came to the study of colour. These were
addressed through the theoretical framework provided by cognitive
linguistics and some of its tools such as: cognitive domains,
metonymy and metaphor. Our study, then, is one of the first to
apply some of the contributions of cognitive linguistics to
lexicography in general, and particularly with reference to the
Hebrew, Greek and Latin versions of the Bible. A further novel
contribution of this research is that the meaning is expressed
through a definition and not through a list of possible colour
terms as happens in dictionaries or in studies referring to colour
in antiquity. The definition allows us to delve deeper and discover
new nuances that enrich the understanding of colour in the three
great civilizations involved in our study: Israel, Greece and Rome.
Language development remains one of the most hotly debated topics
in the cognitive sciences. In recent years we have seen
contributions to the debate from researchers in psychology,
linguistics, artificial intelligence, and philosophy, though there
have been surprisingly few interdisciplinary attempts at unifying
the various theories. In Language and the Learning Curve, a leading
researcher in the field offers a radical new view of language
development. Drawing on formal linguistic theory (the Minimalist
Program, Dependency Grammars), cognitive psychology (skill
learning) computational linguistics (Zipf curves), and Complexity
Theory (networks), it takes the view that syntactic development is
a simple process and that syntax can be learned just like any other
cognitive or motor skill. In a thought provoking and accessible
style, it develops a learning theory of the acquisition of syntax
that builds on the contribution of the different source theories in
a detailed and explicit manner. Each chapter starts by laying the
relevant theoretical background, before examining empirical data on
child language acquisition. The result is a bold new theory of the
acquisition of syntax, unusual in its combination of Chomskian
linguistics and learning theory. Language and the Learning Curve is
an important new work that challenges many of our usual assumptions
about syntactic development.
What is it about the human mind that accounts for the fact that we
can all speak and understand a language? Why can't other creatures
do the same? And what does this tell us about the rest of a human
abilities? Recent dramatic discoveries in linguistics and
psychology provide intriguing answers to these age-old mysteries.
In this fascinating book, Ray Jackendoff emphasizes the grammatical
commonalities across languages, both spoken and signed, and
discusses the implications for our understanding of language
acquisition and loss.
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