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

Corpus linguistics uses large electronic databases of language to examine hypotheses about language use. These can be tested scientifically with computerised analytical tools, without the researcher's preconceptions influencing their conclusions. For this reason, corpus linguistics is a popular and expanding area of study. Contemporary Corpus Linguistics presents a comprehensive survey of the ways in which corpus linguistics is being used by researchers. Written by internationally renowned linguists, this volume of seventeen introductory chapters aims to provide a snapshot of the field of...

The aim of this book is two-fold: to offer a retrospective view on the past thirty years of research on aspectuality and temporality as well as to develop new perspectives on the future development of the field. Articles contain overviews of the development of the field and/or present the state of the art of current research, suggesting new and upcoming lines of research. An important theme throughout the book is typological variation, and the relevance of empirical data for theory formation.

Together the articles in the book take a wide crosslinguistic scope including aspectual...

Addressing an issue that has puzzled the linguistics community for many years, this detailed book offers a novel approach to the exceptional wide scope behaviour of indefinites. It is the first book explicitly dedicated to exceptional wide scope phenomena.

• Offers a detailed analysis of the meaning of these five verbs which have been found to mean 'need', filling a gap in the literature on modality and shedding new light on grammaticalization theory
• Spans the period c.750 to 1710, adopting a corpus-based approach to study the verbs...

Blogs and Wikis have not been with us for long, but have made a huge impact on society. Wikipedia is the best known exemplar of the wiki, a collaborative site that leads to a single text claimed by no-one; blogs, or web-logs, have exploded into the mainstream through novelisations, film adaptations and have gathered huge followings. Blogs and wikis also serve to provide a coherent basis for a discourse analysis of specific web language.
What makes these forms distinctive as genres, and what ramifications does the technology have on the language? Myers looks at how blogs and...

Blogs and Wikis have not been with us for long, but have made a huge impact on society. Wikipedia is the best known exemplar of the wiki, a collaborative site that leads to a single text claimed by no-one; blogs, or web-logs, have exploded into the mainstream through novelisations, film adaptations and have gathered huge followings. Blogs and wikis also serve to provide a coherent basis for a discourse analysis of specific web language.
What makes these forms distinctive as genres, and what ramifications does the technology have on the language? Myers looks at how blogs and...

This is an engaging study of the mental lexicon: the way in which the form and meaning of words is stored by speakers of specific languages. Fortescue attempts to narrow the gap between the results of experimental neurology and the concerns of theoretical linguistics in the area of lexical semantics. The prime goal as regards linguistic theory is to show how matters of lexical organization can be analysed and discussed within a neurologically informed framework that is both adaptable and constrained.
It combines the perspectives of distributed network modelling and linguistic...

Professional Discourse gives a broad and multifaceted perspective on discourse in the professions. For each of these professions, the book explores the dual relationship between discourse and context, outlining how professional discourse is continuously reconstructed in relation to changing contextual frameworks.

The case studies discussed in the book are based on authentic texts and spoken data, collected within different environments and related to different domains. The book includes discussion of both theory and methodology, thus providing tools for exercises and future studies....

Semantic Prosody is the first full-length treatment of semantic prosody, a concept akin to connotation but which connects crucially with typical lexical environment. For example, it has been claimed that the adverb 'utterly' is characterised by an unfavourable semantic prosody on account of its habitual co-occurrence with words denoting unfavourable states of affairs such as 'ridiculous', 'disgraceful' and 'miserable'. Primarily for this reason, semantic prosody has emerged almost exclusively within the field of corpus linguistics. However, the overall picture is complex, and this...