Kategoria BISAC: Language Arts & Disciplines >> Linguistics - General

Teaching Foreign Languages: Languages for Special Purposes is a collection of essays which will appeal to teachers of modern languages no matter the level of instruction. The essays deal with three main approaches of the teaching of languages for special purposes in Europe, Asia and Africa: theoretical linguistics (lexis: French vocabulary; and semantics: French copulative verbs); descriptive linguistics (compared linguistics: English – Romanian, English – Serbian, French – Romanian, French – Serbian, and German – Macedonian); and applied linguistics (language acquisition: English...

Syllable Structure of Bangla: An Optimality-Theoretic Approach is a three part study designed to provide students/readers with a better understanding about the structure of Bangla syllables in terms of phonology and morphology. The book is divided into twelve chapters with each chapter focusing on one particular area of the study.

The first part of this three part study focuses on the frequency of occurrences of different consonant clusters in Bangla. It argues that these clusters are best described with the help of the Bangla lexicon into three strata that include native Bangla words...

Language is one of the most challenging issues that remain to be explained from the physiological and psychological points of view. As a complex system, its formal modelling and simulation present important difficulties. Models proposed up to now have not been able to give either a coherent explanation of natural language or a satisfactory computational model for the processing of natural language. To investigate natural language, we need to cross traditional academic boundaries in order to solve the different problems related to language.

This book is an attempt to connect and integrate...

Introducing Discourse Analysis in Class is a practical introduction to discourse analysis for undergraduates in linguistics degrees or any reader who is interested in how texts function.

Introducing Discourse Analysis in Class

· gives a balanced insight into basic theoretical concepts within discourse analysis;

· offers a set of tools for analysing texts, especially cohesive devices;

· contains numerous practical activities;

· provides a wide variety of authentic texts for analysis.

Introducing Discourse Analysis in Class encourages the use of...

This volume contributes to the latest trends in discourse studies by presenting a Hallidayan corpus-driven critical linguistic analysis. The results are tested statistically, which enhances their reliability as compared with most previous corpus-driven systemic functional analyses. The linguistic analysis is conducted on context-specific corpora built out of speeches delivered on the topic of European integration by key politicians of similar institutional functions in their respective countries, Finland, Hungary and the UK.

The empirical findings offer insights into differences and...

This book presents a new paradigm of natural language grammar analysis, based on adposition as the key concept, considered a general connection between two morphemes – or group of morphemes. The adpositional paradigm considers the morpheme as the basic unit to represent morphosyntax, taken as a whole, in terms of constructions, while semantics and pragmatics are treated accordingly.

All linguistic observations within the book can be described through the methods and tools of Constructive Mathematics, so that the modelling becomes formally feasible. A full description in...

This volume presents a collection of papers from the second Interfaces in Language conference, hosted from 5–7 May 2009 at the University of Kent at Canterbury by the University’s Centre for Language and Lingustic Studies (CLLS). Borne of a dissatisfaction with the rigid division of linguistics into sub-disciplines, Interfaces 2 offered specialists a platform to explore links between different approaches, and attracted participation from ten countries on four continents, addressing a wide range of themes. Contributions are arranged under three thematic headings: Categories and...

Formal Studies in Slavic Linguistics is a collection of selected papers presented at the Graduate Colloquia on Slavic Linguistics held at the Ohio State University, and as such presents current research of young scholars from top European and American universities. The present volume is a continuation of Issues in Slavic Syntax and Semantics (2008). Unlike its predecessor, Formal Studies in Slavic Linguistics exclusively focuses on synchronic analyses of challenging phenomena in various Slavic languages and expands its theoretical scope to include essays in virtually all areas of theoretical...

This volume examines a fundamental concept of language within a historical perspective. The concept is that of public and private communication, the historical period ranges from the late middle ages to the late modern, and the language is English. In short, what are the linguistic traits, discursive practices, communicative settings and intentions which identify and contrast public from private communication, supposing it is possible to make such a fine distinction?

The volume contains contributions from top international scholars working in the fields of, for example, historical...

Language and Politics in Africa is a fine collection of both empirically and theoretically based articles from across the African continent and beyond, but all focusing on the twin issues of Language and Politics in post colonial African countries. The authors offer critical perspectives on contemporary theoretical, empirical and policy issues related to language and how such issues manifest themselves at the inevitable interface with politics in a number of African countries. Coming at a time when most African countries are still grappling with language policy and planning issues while...

Does anxiety about learning and using a foreign language decline as learners become more competent in the target language, or is anxiety also relevant at higher levels of proficiency?

This is the question Foreign Language Anxiety and the Advanced Language Learner sets out to explore. The aim of the book is to give readers an insight into what role anxiety plays in the language learning and communication processes of advanced language learners. Specifically, the study examines how advanced EFL learners’ foreign language anxiety (FLA) can be characterized; how anxiety relates to other...

NooJ is both a corpus processing tool and a linguistic development environment: it allows linguists to formalize several levels of linguistic phenomena: orthography and spelling, lexicons for simple words, multiword units and frozen expressions, inflectional, derivational and productive morphology, local, structural syntax and transformational syntax. For each of these levels, NooJ provides linguists with one or more formal tools specifically designed to facilitate the description of each phenomenon, as well as parsing tools designed to be as computationally efficient as possible. This...

Through combining a knowledge of translation theory and application, the present book aims at holding a semantic comparison of four English translations attempted by Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, ‘Abdullâh Yûsuf ‘Alî, Arthur J. Arberry and Muhammad Mahmûd Ghâlî of Sûrat Ad-Dukhân (the Chapter of Smoke). As a theoretical framework, the book deals with several linguistic and cultural problems of translation, with special reference to Qur'ân translation, and the principles that should be considered on translating the Qur'ân. The core of the book is a comparison of sixty-eight...

This book investigates the acquisition of pronominal elements by monolingual children acquiring English and Brazilian Portuguese as their native languages. Previous studies have found non-adult behavior in children’s use and comprehension of pronouns in two syntactic contexts: resumptive pronouns in relative clauses and anaphoric pronouns bound by argumental noun phrases. Children perform similarly on both contexts, incorrectly accepting these cases at chance level. The age-range when this chance performance is detected is the same in both cases, around 4 and 5 years.

The present study...

Language in Use: The Case of Youth Entertainment Magazines is a collection of seven studies by several Romanian, Bulgarian and Slovenian linguists on the discourse of entertainment magazines targeted at young readers, and published in their respective countries.

The starting point of the seven studies was the idea that the discourse specific to the variety of printed media products selected for analysis was characterized by distinctive features and that these features might exert a manipulative influence on the linguistic and social behavior of the targeted readership. The scholars’...

Speech Actions in Theory and Applied Studies, the first of the two volumes of Pragmatic Perspectives on Language and Linguistics, brings together twenty essays which critically examine linguistic action and explore ways in which it can be accounted for.

The articles presented in this collection are all focused on “doing things with words”, but in most cases do not subscribe to speech act theory in the tradition of John L. Austin and John R. Searle. The linking thread through the volume is not a theoretical commitment to one of the speech-act theoretical models, but the authors’...

The corpus-based approach has developed into a well established paradigm in translation studies and has been recognised as a principal reason for the revival of contrastive linguistics since the 1990s, while corpus-based contrastive and translation studies have in turn significantly expanded the scope of corpus linguistics.

This book features a selection of twenty-three papers from the 2008 meeting of Using Corpora in Contrastive and Translation Studies (UCCTS), an international conference series launched to provide an international forum for the exploration of theoretical and practical...

The overall goal of the volume is to offer an extensive and qualified description of the current research that may stimulate genuine attention on Spoken communication.

The volume gives updated insights on theoretical aspects, specific case studies and the issues of speech representation as well. In the first part different aspects of the cognitive and pragmatic perspectives are analyzed. An insightful account of language pathologies, multimodal spoken dialog interaction and voice expressiveness is given in part two, while sign languages, representation of intonation and automatic detection...

The view that academic discourse is, by definition, impersonal has long been superseded. It seems unquestionable now that the interpersonal component of texts, that is, the ways in which the writers project themselves and their audience in the discourse, is an essential factor determining the success of scholarly communication and has become a fundamental issue in the field of English for Academic Purposes (EAP).

Interpersonality is the key issue around which the articles in this edited book focus on. The eighteen contributions included in this volume provide a wide exploratory view of...

This volume presents sixteen new articles on the acquisition of Romance languages by both well-established researchers and vital new contributors to the field. Under a generative umbrella, the articles in this collection investigate the acquisition of French, Romanian, Spanish, Catalan, Italian and Portuguese across different contexts including first language acquisition, bilingual acquisition, specifically impaired first language acquisition, child L2 acquisition, second language acquisition, as well as first language attrition. This volume advances our understanding of how languages are...