The primary grammatical reference for the Neo-Aramaic dialects "spoken by the Eastern Syrians [modern Assyrians & Chaldeans] of Kurdistan, North-West Persia, and the Plain of Mosul," includes notices of the dialects of the Jews of Azerbaijan & Zakhu.

Recognizing the characteristics of children with learning disabilities and deciding how to help them is a problem faced by schools all over the world. Although some disorders are fairly easily recognizable (e.g., mental retardation) or very specific to single components of performance and quite rare (e.g., developmental dyscalculia), schools must consider much larger populations of children with learning difficulties who cannot always be readily classified. These children present high-level learning difficulties that affect their performance on a variety of school tasks, but the underlying problem is often their difficulty in understanding written text. In many instances, despite good intellectual abilities and a superficial ability to cope with written texts and to use language appropriately, some children do not seem to grasp the most important elements, or cannot find the pieces of information they are looking for. Sometimes these difficulties are not immediately detected by the teacher in the early school years. They may be hidden because the most obvious early indicators of reading progress in the teacher's eyes do not involve comprehension of written texts or because the first texts a child encounters are quite simple and reflect only the difficulty level of the oral messages (sentences, short stories, etc.) with which the child is already familiar. However, as years go by and texts get more complex, comprehension difficulties will become increasingly apparent and increasingly detrimental to effective school learning. In turn, studying, assimilating new information, and many other situations requiring text comprehension -- from problem solving to reasoning with linguistic contents -- could be affected.
Problems with decoding, dyslexia, and language disorders have attracted more interest from researchers than have specific comprehension problems and have occupied more room in specialized journals. Normal reading comprehension has also been a favorite with researchers. However, scarce interest has been paid to subjects who have comprehension difficulties. This book is an attempt to remedy this situation. In so doing, this volume answers the following questions:
* Does a reading comprehension problem exist in schools?
* How important and widespread is the problem?
* Is the problem specific?
* How can a reading comprehension difficulty be defined and identified?
* Does the "syndrome" have a single pattern or can different subtypes be identified?
* What are the main characteristics associated with a reading comprehension difficulty?
* When can other well-identified problems add to our understanding of reading comprehension difficulties?
* Which educational strategies are effective in preventing and treating reading comprehension difficulties?
* What supplementary information can we get from an international perspective?

In an attempt to fill the gap left by the many published studies on classroom second language research, this book explores a variety of human, social, and political issues involved in the carrying out of such studies. Many journals are chock-full of the results of classroom research, with evidence to support one claim or another about the efficacy of one teaching method or another. Many textbooks are replete with statistical procedures to be used, and with experimental designs to fit varying situations. Too often overlooked in these treatments are the human, social, and political issues involved in carrying out research in classrooms that are not one's own. What are the problems going to be when one attempts work such as this? What does one do on discovering that an administrator's agenda is different than one had thought? What does one do when a teacher resents intrusions into her classroom? This book offers a view on those kinds of issues, as presented and managed by successful classroom researchers themselves.
The authors present their own experiences including, on occasion, their trials and tribulations and how they dealt with them. They lay themselves open to criticism in doing so, but they make their contributions much the richer as well. The classroom contexts extend to different countries, and range from elementary schools to universities. Some of the issues presented are:
* the necessarily collaborative nature of the research;
* the question of meshing pedagogically sound and experimentally acceptable practices;
* the often strong possibility that political and social decisions will interrupt the research;
* the perennial question of reporting out the results; and
* the training of graduate student researchers.

What is text understanding?
It is the dynamic process of constructing coherent representations and inferences at multiple levels of text and context, within the bottleneck of a limited-capacity working memory.
The field of text and discourse has advanced to the point where researchers have developed sophisticated models of comprehension, and identified the particular assumptions that underlie comprehension mechanisms in precise analytical or mathematical detail. The models offer "a priori" predictions about thought and behavior, not merely "ad hoc" descriptions of data. Indeed, the field has evolved to a mature science.
The contributors to this volume collectively cover the major models of comprehension in the field of text and discourse. Other books are either narrow -- covering only a single theoretical framework -- or do not focus on systematic modeling efforts. In addition, this book focuses on deep levels of understanding rather than language codes, syntax, and other shallower levels of text analysis. As such, it provides readers with up-to-date information on current psychological models specified in quantitative or analytical detail.

This book tries to answer the question posed by Minsky at the beginning of "The Society of Mind: " "to explain the mind, we have to show how minds are built from mindless stuff, from parts that are much smaller and simpler than anything we'd considered smart." The author believes that cognition should not be rooted in innate rules and primitives, but rather grounded in human memory. More specifically, he suggests viewing linguistic comprehension as a time-constrained process -- a race for building an interpretation in short term memory.
After reviewing existing psychological and computational approaches to text understanding and concluding that they generally rely on self-validating primitives, the author abandons this objectivist and normative approach to meaning and develops a set of requirements for a grounded cognitive architecture. He then goes on to explain how this architecture must avoid all epistemological commitments, be tractable both with respect to space and time, and, most importantly, account for the diachronic and non-deterministic nature of comprehension. In other words, a text may or may not lead to an interpretation for a specific reader, and may be associated with several interpretations over time by one reader.
Throughout the remainder of the book, the author demonstrates that rules for all major facets of comprehension -- syntax, reference resolution, quantification, lexical and structural disambiguation, inference and subject matter -- can be expressed in terms of the simple mechanistic computing elements of a massively parallel network modeling memory. These elements, called knowledge units, work in a limited amount of time and have the ability not only to recognize but also to build the structures that make up an interpretation.
Designed as a main text for graduate courses, this volume is essential to the fields of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, memory modeling, text understanding, computational linguistics and natural language understanding. Other areas of application are schema-matching, hermeneutics, local connectionism, and text linguistics. With its extensive bibliography, the book is also valuable as supplemental reading for introductory undergraduate courses in cognitive science and computational linguistics.

Idioms have always aroused the curiosity of linguists and there is a long tradition in the study of idioms, especially within the fields of lexicology and lexicography. Without denying the importance of this tradition, this volume presents an overview of recent idiom research outside the immediate domain of lexicology/lexicography. The chapters address the status of idioms in recent formal and experimental linguistic theorizing. Interdisciplinary in scope, the contributions are written by psycholinguists and theoretical and computational linguists who take mutual advantage of progress in all disciplines. Linguists supply the facts and analyses psycholinguists base their models and experiments on; psycholinguists in turn confront linguistic models with psycholinguistic findings. Computational linguists build natural language processing systems on the basis of models and frameworks provided by theoretical linguists and, sometimes psycholinguists, and set up large corpora to test linguistic hypotheses. Besides the fascination for idioms that make up such a large part of our knowledge of language, interdisciplinarity is one of the attractions of investigations in idiomatic language and language processing.

A new edition of a successful undergraduate textbook on contemporary international Standard English grammar, based on Huddleston and Pullum's earlier award-winning work, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002). The analyses defended there are outlined here more briefly, in an engagingly accessible and informal style. Errors of the older tradition of English grammar are noted and corrected, and the excesses of prescriptive usage manuals are firmly rebutted in specially highlighted notes that explain what older authorities have called 'incorrect' and show why those authorities are mistaken. Intended for students in colleges or universities who have little or no background in grammar or linguistics, this teaching resource contains numerous exercises and online resources suitable for any course on the structure of English in either linguistics or English departments. A thoroughly modern undergraduate textbook, rewritten in an easy-to-read conversational style with a minimum of technical and theoretical terminology.

The ten contributions in this volume focus on a range of linearization challenges, all of which aim to shed new light on the central, still largely mysterious question of how the abundant evidence that linguistic structures are hierarchically organised can plausibly be reconciled with the fact that actually realised linguistic strings are typically sequentially ordered. Some of the contributions present particularly challenging data, those on the mixed spoken and signed output of bimodal Italian children, Quechua nominal morphology, Kannada reduplication and Taqbaylit of Chemini "floating prepositions" all being cases in point. Others have a typological focus, highlighting and attempting to explain striking patterns like the Final-over-Final Constraint or considering the predictions of particular theoretical approacesh (the movement theory of Control, multidominance, Distributed Morphology) in relation to structures that we do and don't expect to be "possible linguistic structures". Broader architectural questions also receive attention from various perspectives. This volume will be of interest to advanced students and researchers with interests in the externalisation of ling

Students improve their Tier 2 academic vocabulary using Contemporary's Words to Learn By!

In this multi-faceted study of Greek texts related to Ephrem, Emereau examines these works from a number of angles, including their poetic form, their influence on homily writers of the 5th cent., and Byzantine hymnography.

Perfect for self-study or classroom learners, this Farsi language book takes a user-friendly approach. Farsi for Beginners is a complete language course by experienced teacher Dr. Saeid Atoofi, which will help you to speak the language and open doors to Persian culture. This second edition is updated to include IT and social media vocabulary and downloadable audio files. Whether for pleasure, travel or business, language learners will find these lessons clear and easy to follow. By the end of this course, you'll be able to understand short sentences, express your basic needs, and read and write the 32-letter Farsi alphabet. Farsi for Beginners contains the following essential features: Dialogues and stories about a family traveling to contemporary Iran Downloadable native-speaker audio recordings help you to pronounce Farsi accurately Idioms, sayings and poems introducing you to the cultures in which Farsi is used Extensive exercises with answer keys to guide your learning process Photos and insider cultural tips teach you about Persian culture Farsi is the language of Persia (present-day Iran). More than 1.5 million Iranian-Americans live in the U.S. today, and Farsi is considered a "critically needed" language by the U.S. government.

In On the Tip of My Tongue, logophile and television star Tom Read Wilson takes a delicious dive into the etymology and usage of words, euphemisms and bon mots. Written with his trademark sparkling wit, the star of Celebs Go Dating and self-avowed word-lover presents a hilarious and fascinating guide which aims to leave you never lost for words again. Divided into sections spanning dating, personal development, show business, compliments, curses, and how to dodge offence while speaking your mind, this book will equip you with the words needed to navigate all the situations of modern life with style and grace. From treppenwitz (the German word for the feeling of a missed riposte in an argument) to Callipygian (a 17th Century word referring to someone with well shaped buttocks) to JOMO (the Joy of Missing Out), this guide covers a wide and varied range of words, from those with roots in antiquity to new ones being coined in the present day. With Tom's wit and lifelong love of words by your side, you'll always be able to pick the perfect word, phrase or quip, whether you are trying to understand the many metaphors for sex or trying to tell your mother you love her. This is a delightful and hilarious etymological solution to the dilemmas and conundrums of modern life and a must-read for every budding vocabularian.

Bullshit is everywhere. Some of it is just lazy, some is complete nonsense, and yet some is at least trying to communicate something, even if it fails. Bestselling author Kevin Duncan has been on a life mission to improve business language and understanding. In his latest book, he weeds out the worst offenders, and the contexts in which they most frequently occur, to provide readers with a path to clear communication. The book starts with an examination of why we seem to use so much jargon and non-sensical words and phrases in our daily working lives. Duncan then lists and analyses the 100 most popular examples of bullshit used internally and externally, their real meaning, and rates how harmless or dangerous they are. The book ends with advice on dealing with bullshitters and a manifesto to help anyone achieve clear, bullshit-free communication.

Guide for Grammar, Voice, and Sentence Structure "If you're going to have one grammar book on your shelf, make it this one!" -Dani Alcorn, COO at Writing Academy and cofounder of Writer's Secret Sauce #1 New Release in Writing, Research & Publishing Guides, Composition and Language, Grammar Reference, Semantics, Vocabulary Books, Study & Teaching Reference, Reading Skills, and editing Comma Sense by Ellen Feld is a style guide for all things grammar. Learn the rules of adverbs, punctuation, abbreviations, prepositions, and much more. Feld shows you how to write technically, professionally, and personally. Grammar for everyone. Master English grammar with Ellen Feld. Comma Sense goes above and beyond the average grammar book. Professional writers, students, novices, and experts can benefit from learning or relearning the basics of grammar and beyond: em dashes, parentheticals and parallelism, diction and logic, run-on sentences and sentence fragments, and more. Become a master of capitalization and punctuation, subjects and predicates, and contractions and possessives. Test Your Knowledge. After every chapter, take a quiz to practice your new grammatical skills in this great grammar workbook. At the end of the book, a comprehensive test allows you to utilize all you have learned. Inside, you'll find: The basics of grammar and beyond Tips for better writing Terrific supplementary resources Readers who enjoyed The Elements of Style; Actually, the Comma Goes Here; The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation; or The Perfect English Grammar Workbook will love Comma Sense: A Guide to Grammar Victory. Workbook will love Comma Sense: Your Guide to Grammar Victory.

Learn to speak, read, and write Korean with this complete language guide for beginners! Learning Korean teaches you the basics of the Korean language, including practical daily conversations and vocabulary, and enables you to begin communicating effectively right away. All Korean words and sentences are given in Korean Hangeul script and romanized form for easy pronunciation, with English translations. Key features include: 11 lessons designed for beginning adult learners Basic sentence patterns and vocabulary used in daily conversations Suitable for self-study learners as well as beginning level classes Hangeul and Romanized versions of all Korean texts with English translations Cultural notes for understanding Korean customs and norms A dictionary of commonly-used words and phrases Accompanying native speaker audio recordings Downloadable flashcards The book also includes useful notes and explanations on pronunciation, the Korean Hangeul script, greetings and requests, basic sentence structure and vocabulary, verb conjugations, honorific forms, idiomatic expressions, and etiquette dos and don'ts. Free native-speaker MP3 audio recordings of the dialogues and vocabulary are available online and enable language learners to improve their pronunciation, while printable flashcards help with vocabulary memorization.

A fun and helpful resource for anyone interested in learning some Vietnamese--whether you're 5 or 100! This picture dictionary covers the 1,500 most useful Vietnamese words and phrases. Each word and sentence is given using the Vietnamese alphabet--with a Romanized version to help you pronounce it correctly--along with the English meaning. The words are grouped into 40 different themes or topics, including basics, like meeting someone new and using public transportation, to culture-specific topics, like celebrating Vietnamese holidays and eating Vietnamese food. This colorful picture dictionary includes: Over 750 color photographs 1,500 culture-specific Vietnamese words and phrases 38 different topics--from social media and counting to Vietnamese food and holidays Example sentences showing how the words are used Free online audio recordings by native Vietnamese speakers of all the vocabulary and sentences to download or stream An introduction to Vietnamese pronunciation and grammar A bidirectional index to allow you to quickly look up words Vietnamese Picture Dictionary makes language learning more fun than traditional phrasebooks. This resource is perfect for beginners of all ages--curious kids, visual learners and future travelers to Vietnam.

This textbook has the basic purpose of preparing students with no linguistic background to discover the grammatical structure of an unwritten language. The Americanist symbols are used. The Laboratory Manual for Morphology and Syntax, 7th ed, (revised, 2003), is a practical supplement to accompany the textbook. It contains 298 datasets of problems taken from 117 spoken languages. (IPA) symbols replaced the Americanist symbols in some datasets.

Lying at the intersection of translatology, cognitive science and linguistics, this brief provides a comprehensive framework for studying, investigating and teaching English-Russian/Russian-English non-literary translation. It provides a holistic perspective on the process of non-literary translation, illustrating each of its steps with carefully analyzed real-life examples. Readers will learn how to choose and process multidimensional attention units in original texts by activating different types of knowledge, as well as how to effectively devise target-language matches for them using various translation techniques. It is rounded out with handy and feasible recommendations on the structure and content of an undergraduate course in translation. The abundance of examples makes it suitable not only for use in the classroom, but also for independent study.