Making Sense of Large Social Media Corpora
This open access book offers a comprehensive overview of available techniques and approaches to explore large social media corpora, using as an illustrative case study the Coronavirus Twitter corpus. First, the author describes in detail a number of methods, strategies, and tools that can be used to access, manage, and explore large Twitter/X corpora, including both user-friendly applications and more advanced methods that involve the use of data management skills and custom programming scripts. He goes on to show how these tools and methods are applied to explore one of the largest Twitter datasets on the COVID-19 pandemic publicly released, covering the two years when the pandemic had the strongest impact on society. Specifically, keyword extraction, topic modelling, sentiment analysis, and hashtag analysis methods are described, contrasted, and applied to extract information from the Coronavirus Twitter Corpus. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in fields that make use of big data to address societal and linguistic concerns, including corpus linguistics, sociology, psychology, and economics.
Pragmatics, Utterance Meaning, and Representational Gesture
Humans produce utterances intentionally. Visible bodily action, or gesture, has long been acknowledged as part of the broader activity of speaking, but it is only recently that the role of gesture during utterance production and comprehension has been the focus of investigation. If we are to understand the role of gesture in communication, we must answer the following questions: Do gestures communicate? Do people produce gestures with an intention to communicate? This Element argues that the answer to both these questions is yes. Gestures are (or can be) communicative in all the ways language is. This Element arrives at this conclusion on the basis that communication involves prediction. Communicators predict the behaviours of themselves and others, and such predictions guide the production and comprehension of utterance. This Element uses evidence from experimental and neuroscientific studies to argue that people produce gestures because doing so improves such predictions.
Building and Interpreting Possession Sentences
A wide-ranging generative analysis of the typology of possession sentences, solving long-standing puzzles in their syntax and semantics. A major question for linguistic theory concerns how the structure of sentences relates to their meaning. There is broad agreement in the field that there is some regularity in the way that lexical semantics and syntax are related, so that thematic roles (the different participant roles in an event: agent, theme, goal, etc.) are predictably associated with particular syntactic positions. In this book, Neil Myler examines the syntax and semantics of possession sentences, which are infamous for appearing to diverge dramatically from this broadly regular pattern. On the one hand, Myler points out, possession sentences have too many meanings; in any given language, the construction used to express archetypal possessive meanings (such as personal ownership) is also often used to express other apparently unrelated notions (body parts, kinship relations, and many others). On the other hand, possession sentences have too many surface structures; languages differ markedly in the argument structures used to convey the same possessive meanings. Myler argues that recent work on the syntax-semantics interface in the generative tradition has developed the tools needed to solve these puzzles. Examining and synthesizing ideas from the literature and drawing on data from many languages (including some understudied Quechua dialects), Myler presents a novel way to understand the apparent irregularity of possession sentences while preserving explanations of general cross-linguistic regularities, offering a unified approach to the syntax and semantics of possession sentences that can also be integrated into a general theory of argument structure.
Digital Oratory as Discursive Practice
This book offers an appraisal of oratory, old and new, relating former discourse practice to a specific sub-set of contemporary, digital practices. The author explores the interface between language and society, providing an interdisciplinary study at the crossroads of discourse, linguistics, communication and rhetoric. The comparisons she draws are particularly pertinent in light of the steep rise in presentations given during video-conferences, webinars, and other online events during the COVID-19 pandemic, an event which accelerated previous moves towards digital communication and which is likely to have a long-term impact on communication styles. This book will be of interest to academics and students in fields including discourse analysis, applied linguistics, communication studies, digital studies and business studies.
Medea
Medea has abandoned her family and homeland of Colchis for the love of the great hero Jason, and her loyalty, cunning and talents in witchcraft have repeatedly rescued him. Now, after bearing him two fine sons and settling in Corinth, Jason announces that Medea is to be cast aside, freeing him to marry royalty. Finding herself not only abandoned but banished from Corinth and driven beyond madness, a desperate Medea commits an unspeakable act of vengeance against her former husband. This English adaptation of Euripides' classic play is in rhymed verse to create a close approximation of the rhythms and poetry of the original Greek text.
Modelling Between Digital and Humanities
This volume presents an exploration of Digital Humanities (DH), a field focused on the reciprocal transformation of digital technologies and humanities scholarship. Central to DH research is the practice of modelling, which involves translating intricate knowledge systems into computational models. This book addresses a fundamental query: How can an effective language be developed to conceptualize and guide modelling in DH? Modelling, with its historical roots, carries multifaceted meanings influenced by various disciplinary contexts. Modelling Between Digital and Humanities innovatively connects DH with the historical tradition of model-based thinking in the humanities, cultural studies, and the sciences. It endeavors to reshape interpretative frameworks by contextualizing DH's modelling practices within a broader conceptual landscape. Through an exploration of digital, visual and data models, the book asserts that DH holds the potential to be a cornerstone of a novel cultural literacy paradigm. By probing the interplay between technology and thought, the book ultimately positions DH as a catalyst for transformative cultural insights.
Modelling Between Digital and Humanities
This volume presents an exploration of Digital Humanities (DH), a field focused on the reciprocal transformation of digital technologies and humanities scholarship. Central to DH research is the practice of modelling, which involves translating intricate knowledge systems into computational models. This book addresses a fundamental query: How can an effective language be developed to conceptualize and guide modelling in DH? Modelling, with its historical roots, carries multifaceted meanings influenced by various disciplinary contexts. Modelling Between Digital and Humanities innovatively connects DH with the historical tradition of model-based thinking in the humanities, cultural studies, and the sciences. It endeavors to reshape interpretative frameworks by contextualizing DH's modelling practices within a broader conceptual landscape. Through an exploration of digital, visual and data models, the book asserts that DH holds the potential to be a cornerstone of a novel cultural literacy paradigm. By probing the interplay between technology and thought, the book ultimately positions DH as a catalyst for transformative cultural insights.
Intercultural Competence and Pragmatics
This Open Access book examines the link between intercultural competence (IC) and pragmatics by asking frontline modern foreign language teachers in higher education teaching a variety of languages (e.g., Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish) how they conceptualise intercultural competence and which skills, competences and knowledge they consider important in their teaching contexts. The data were collected with an online survey that focused on the relationship between intercultural competence and pragmatics.While international organizations such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) or the Council of Europe (CoE) agree that intercultural competence should play an important role in education, it is not always clear what IC may encompass in specific teaching contexts and subject areas. Examining how modern foreign language teachers in higher education conceptualise intercultural competence and the value they attach as well as the attention they give to various areas of pragmatics in their teaching is highly important, since those language professionals may be the final teachers learners encounter during their formal foreign language education. They are therefore in a unique position to shape modern foreign language learners' intercultural and pragmatic awareness, competence and skills.This book will be of interest to language professionals, modern foreign language teachers and teacher trainers, as well as students and scholars of applied linguistics, pragmatics, and language education.
The Minority Language as a Second Language
This innovative collection is the first of its kind to showcase global perspectives on learning minority languages as second languages, offering unique insights into their acquisition and specific characteristics and raising greater awareness around other languages and contexts where SLA occurs.
Sleight of Mouth Volume II
At the foundation of Sleight of Mouth is the realization that words can create worlds. Language is a pivotal part of how we humans create our maps and models of reality, for better or for worse. Changing the words we use can shift the reality that we perceive, especially when those words relate to core beliefs. Sleight of Mouth patterns are "verbal reframes" which influence beliefs, and the mental maps from which beliefs have been formed. The word sleight means "crafty," "cunning," "artful" or "dexterous." Sleight of hand, for example, is a type of magic done by close-up card magicians. The verbal patterns of Sleight of Mouth have a similar "magical" quality because they can often create dramatic shifts in perception and the assumptions upon which particular perceptions are based. These same patterns can also be used for verbal trickery. More than any other time in human history, language is determining our reality. We are constantly bombarded with words and other information through the Internet and social media as well as traditional media channels. All of these sources are subject to things like fake news and "alternative facts," conspiracy theories, "filter bubbles" and "algorithmic editing." It is essential to have ways to know what is valid and helpful and what is potentially deceptive and harmful. This book is about how to do that.Beliefs have a verbal structure that, when understood, allows them to be evaluated and updated. In this book, Sleight of Mouth creator Robert Dilts provides an in depth presentation of each of the fourteen Sleight of Mouth patterns, including examples of the patterns from well-known historical figures. He also shows how particular combinations of patterns have been applied to produce both individual and social change. Throughout the book, Dilts also identifies "red flags" that indicate potentially limiting beliefs and "thought viruses." The result is a fascinating journey that explores how words can change worlds.
Corpus Linguistics for Health Communication
Corpus Linguistics for Health Communication provides an accessible and practical introduction to the use of corpus linguistic methods to analyse health-related language use across various contexts and genres.
The size of things II
This book focuses on the role size plays in grammar. Under the umbrella term size fall the size of syntactic projections, the size of feature content, and the size of reference sets. This Volume II discusses size effects in movement, agreement, and interpretation while the contributions in Volume I focus on size and structure building. Part I of Volume II investigates how size interacts with head movement and various phrasal movement including left branch extraction, object shift, tough movement, and multiple wh movement. Part II of this volume discusses the role size plays in agreement and morphology-related matters like allomorphy. Contributions in Part III focus on semantic-oriented issues, in particular the size of reference domains and NPI licensing. The languages covered in this volume include American Sign Language, Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian and various other Slavic languages, German, Icelandic, dialects of Italian, Japanese, Nancowry, Panoan languages, and Tamil.
Translation as Creative-Critical Practice
In Translation as Creative-Critical Practice, Delphine Grass questions the separation between practice and theory in translation studies through her analysis of creative-critical translation experiments. Focusing on contemporary literary and artistic engagements with translation such as the autotheoretical translation memoir, performative translations and 'transtopian' literary and visual art works, this Element argues for a renewed engagement with translation theory from the point of view of translation as artistic and practice-based research capable of reframing translation theory. Exploring examples of translation as both a norm-breaking and world-making activity in the works of Kate Briggs, Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi, No矇mie Grunenwald, Anne Carson, Charles Bernstein, Chantal Wright or Slavs and Tatars to name a few, this Element prompts us to reconsider the current place of translation practice in translation studies.
Language and Decolonisation
Language and Decolonisation is the first collection to bring together views from across scholarly communities that are committed to the decolonisation agenda in language study. It is essential for advanced students, scholars and researchers of language, culture, sociolinguistics, decolonial studies, racial studies, and related areas.
Development and Validation of a Computerized Adaptive EFL Test
Corpus-Assisted Ecolinguistics
Corpus-Assisted Ecolinguistics introduces and integrates key research concepts, principles and techniques in ecolinguistics and corpus-assisted discourse study, answering foundational questions for researchers new to the discipline and asserting the urgent need to expand its scope. Breaking new ground, the book analyzes under-explored environmental discourses that have a tangible impact on ecological wellbeing and sustainability by perpetuating harmful attitudes, practices and ideologies. Chapters present in-depth case studies, including an analysis of the evolving representations of wilderness, an eco-stylistic analysis of a popular novel, and an investigation of the use of humor in reports on animal escapes from slaughterhouses. The studies employ a range of corpus analysis techniques to show how ecological degradation and crisis have become normalized, and even trivialized, in popular discourse but also spaces where positive discourse practices are present. By applying tools from corpus linguistics to a diverse range of environmental discourses, this book makes a significant contribution to advancing the field of ecolinguistics.
The Patterns of Comics
Comics are a global phenomenon, and yet it's easy to distinguish the visual styles of comics from Asia, Europe, or the United States. But, do the structures of these visual narratives differ in more subtle ways? Might these comics actually be drawn in different visual languages that vary in their structures across cultures? To address these questions, The Patterns of Comics seeks evidence through a sustained analysis of an annotated corpus of over 36,000 panels from more than 350 comics from Asia, Europe, and the United States. This data-driven approach reveals the cross-cultural variation in symbology, layout, and storytelling between various visual languages, and shows how comics have changed across 80 years. It compares, for example, the subtypes within American comics and Japanese manga, and analyzes the formal properties of Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes across its entire 10-year run. Throughout, it not only uncovers the patterns in and across the panels of comics, but shows how these regularities in the visual languages of comics connect to the organizing principles of all languages.
Visual Metaphors and Aesthetics
This book offers a new definition of metaphor-as an ontological and visual construction, whose roots are external visual forms, and its motivation is our attachment to forms. This definition, which Michalle Gal names "visualist," challenges the ruling conceptualist theory of metaphors and places a new emphasis on how we experience rather than understand metaphors. In doing so, she responds to the visual turn that is taking place in literature and the media, demanding that the visual become a site of philosophical analysis. This focus on the external visual world allows Gal to employ visual theories to capture the essence of metaphor. She looks beyond conceptual or semantic mechanism, and returns to theories of Arnheim and Gombrich and the current evolution of ideas about the visual or material and embodied cognition. Proposing to see visual metaphors in their basic form, she uses a new externalist terminology of ontology, visuality, composition, affordance, construction, and emergence. Setting out a new theory that takes into account that humans are visual no less than cognitive creatures, Visual Metaphors and Aesthetics lays the foundation for a new vocabulary to talk about metaphors.
Historische Mehrsprachigkeit
Just as languages are not evenly distributed across the world, the extent, manifestations, and linguistic effects of multilingualism not only vary geographically but have also changed historically. This volume focuses on Europe, examining in which way and to which extent multilingualism shaped the history and everyday lives of Europeans in different epochs and countries.
Pronoun Trouble
With his trademark humor and flair, bestselling linguist John McWhorter busts the myths and shares the history of the most controversial language topic of our times: pronouns The nature of language is to shift and evolve--but every so often, a new usage creates a whole lot of consternation. These days, pronouns are throwing curveballs, and it matters, because pronoun habits die hard. If you need a refresher from eighth-grade English: Pronouns are short, used endlessly, and serve to point and direct, to orient us as to what is meant about who. Him, not her. Me, not you. Pronouns get a heavy workout, and as such, they become part of our hardwiring. To mess with our pronouns is to mess with us. But many of today's hot-button controversies are nonsense. The singular they has been with us since the 1400s and appears in Shakespeare's works. In fact, many of the supposedly iron-clad rules of grammar are up for debate (Billy and me went to the store is perfectly logical!), and with tasty trivia, unexpected twists, and the weird quirks of early and contemporary English, John McWhorter guides readers on a journey of how our whole collection of these little words emerged and has changed over time.
Investigating the Role of Affective Factors in Second Language Learning Tasks
This book provides an overview of affective individual variables that are considered relevant for second language learning and outlines a novel approach to researching them. In the first part of the book, the most prominent concepts and theories in connection with affective individual variables and tasks are discussed, followed by a literature review of the most significant empirical studies conducted on the reviewed individual variables with the help of tasks. The second part of the monograph reports the findings of a research project which investigated the relationships of motivation, emotions, flow experiences, and self-efficacy beliefs of secondary school students studying English in Hungary. These constructs are examined at two levels: in connection with learners' English classes in general and in connection with a particular language task, thus linking task performance measures to specific affective states experienced while performing a task and their general trait versions reported in connection with the language classes. Teacher interviews provide further insights into the language tasks used by the teachers of the students taking part in the study and their affective correlates. The book offers multi-level interpretations of the results, puts forward pedagogical implications, and delineates further research directions.
Merge and the Strong Minimalist Thesis
The goal of this contribution to the Elements series is to closely examine Merge, its form, its function, and its central role in current linguistic theory. It explores what it does (and does not do), why it has the form it has, and its development over time. The basic idea behind Merge is quite simple. However, Merge interacts, in intricate ways, with other components including the language's interfaces, laws of nature, and certain language-specific conditions. Because of this, and because of its fundamental place in the human faculty of language, this Element's focus on Merge provides insights into the goals and development of generative grammar more generally, and its prospects for the future.
PARS in Charge
This edited collection, the third in a series of books by editors Jessie Borgman and Casey McArdle, explores the complexity of administrative positions within writing programs and how online courses make administration even more complex. Drawing on the PARS framework (Personal, Accessible, Responsive, Strategic) used in the first two books, PARS in Charge provides insights and examples from administrators across the country focusing on how they have implemented the PARS framework to be successful online writing program leaders in their specific leadership positions.
Living with Nature, Cherishing Language
This open access book explores the deep connections between environment, language, and cultural integrity, with a focus on Indigenous peoples from early modern times to the present. It illustrates the close integration of nature and culture through historical processes of environmental change in North, Central, and South America and the nurturing of local knowledge through ancestral languages and oral traditions. This volume fills a unique space by bringing together the issues of environment, language and cultural integrity in Latin American historical and cultural spheres. It explores the reciprocal and necessary relations between language/culture and environment; how they can lead to sustainable practices; how environmental knowledge and sustainable practices toward the environment are reflected in local languages, local sources and local socio-cultural practices. The book combines interdisciplinary methods and initiates a dialogue among scientifically trained scholars and local communities to compare their perspectives on well-being in remote and recent historical periods and it will be of interest to students and scholars in fields including sociolinguistics, (ethno)history, linguistic anthropology, cultural studies and cultural anthropology, environmental studies and Indigenous/minority studies.
Coordinate Structures
In a coordination construction, which is universally available, two or more syntactic constituents are combined, with or without an overt coordinator. This Element examines how coordinate structures are derived syntactically, focussing on the syntactic operations involved, including constraints on both their operations and the representations they produce. Specifically, considering the recent research development in the syntax of coordination, the Element discusses whether any special syntactic operation is required to derive various coordinate constructions, including constructions in which each conjunct has a gap, whether there is any special functional category heading coordinate constructions in general, what the morphosyntactic statuses of coordinators (i.e., conjunctions and disjunctions) are in some specific languages, whether the structure of a coordinate construction can be beyond the binary complementation structure, and whether the mobility of conjuncts and the mobility of elements in conjuncts require any construction-specific constraint on syntactic operations.
Living with Nature, Cherishing Language
This open access book explores the deep connections between environment, language, and cultural integrity, with a focus on Indigenous peoples from early modern times to the present. It illustrates the close integration of nature and culture through historical processes of environmental change in North, Central, and South America and the nurturing of local knowledge through ancestral languages and oral traditions. This volume fills a unique space by bringing together the issues of environment, language and cultural integrity in Latin American historical and cultural spheres. It explores the reciprocal and necessary relations between language/culture and environment; how they can lead to sustainable practices; how environmental knowledge and sustainable practices toward the environment are reflected in local languages, local sources and local socio-cultural practices. The book combines interdisciplinary methods and initiates a dialogue among scientifically trained scholars and local communities to compare their perspectives on well-being in remote and recent historical periods and it will be of interest to students and scholars in fields including sociolinguistics, (ethno)history, linguistic anthropology, cultural studies and cultural anthropology, environmental studies and Indigenous/minority studies.
L2 Writing Assessment
This book tackles three choices that face developers of L2 writing assessments: defining L2 writing abilities; collecting evidence of those abilities (usually by getting L2 writers to write something); and judging their performance (usually by assigning a score or grade to it). It takes a historical view of how assessment developers have made those choices, how contemporary practices emerged, and of alternative techniques that have risen and fallen over time. The three sections each tackle one of these choices. The first considers the social functions that define L2 writing and assessment; the second relates how assessment tasks have adapted to changing conceptions of languages, writing, and assessment; and the third explores how scoring systems have evolved. Each section brings the reader up to date with current issues confronting writing assessment (both in large-scale testing and in language classrooms) before considering the new opportunities and challenges of the digital age. This book will be of interest to students, scholars and practitioners in language assessment, language education, and applied linguistics.
The Attempted Erasure of the Khoekhoe and San
The Attempted Erasure of the Khoekhoe and San delves into the complex issue of problematic coloured identity and the ongoing erasure of the Khoekhoe and San people in South Africa. Despite the end of apartheid, this erasure continues to persist today, starting as far back as 1652. There were two types of erasure that took place - genocide and bureaucratic. While the former is acknowledged by President Thabo Mbeki in his "I Am an African" speech, the latter began in 1828 with Ordinance 50 in the Cape Colony. From this point, the Khoekhoe and San were bureaucratically erased, culminating in the 1950 Population Registration Act. Despite these attempts, the Khoekhoe and San people resisted and fought for their identity, resulting in their continued existence in the present day. This book documents their painful journey, highlighting their struggles against subjugation and erasure since 1652.
Lexical Variation and Change
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book introduces a systematic framework for understanding and investigating lexical variation, using a distributional semantics approach. Distributional semantics embodies the idea that the context in which a word occurs reveals the meaning of that word. In contemporary corpus linguistics, that idea takes shape in various types of quantitative analysis of the corpus contexts in which words appear. In this book, the authors explore how count-based token-level semantic vector spaces, as an advanced form of such a quantitative methodology, can be applied to the study of polysemy, lexical variation, and lectometry. What can distributional models reveal about meaning? How can they be used to analyse the semantic relationship between near-synonyms, and to identify strict synonymy? How can they contribute to the study of lexical variation as a sociolinguistic variable, and to the use of those variables to measure convergence or divergence between language varieties? To answer these questions, the book presents a comprehensive model of lexical and semantic variation, based on the combination of a semasiological, an onomasiological, and a lectal dimension. It explains the mechanism of distributional modelling, both informally and technically, and introduces workflows and corpus linguistic tools that implement a distributional perspective in lexical research. Combining a cognitive linguistic interest in meaning with a sociolinguistic interest in variation, the authors illustrate this distributional methodology using case studies of Dutch and Spanish lexical data that focus on the detection of polysemy, the interaction of semasiological and onomasiological change, and sociolinguistic issues of lexical standardization and pluricentricity. Throughout, they highlight both the advantages and disadvantages of a distributional methodology: on the one hand, it has great potential to be scaled up for lexical research; on the other, its outcome does not necessarily neatly correspond with what would traditionally be considered different senses.
Historical Etiquette
This book is a groundbreaking study of etiquette in the nineteenth century when the success of etiquette books reached unprecedented heights in Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States. It positions etiquette as a fully-fledged theoretical concept within the fields of politeness studies and historical pragmatics. After tracing the origin of etiquette back to Spanish court protocol, the analysis takes a novel approach to key aspects of etiquette: its highly coercive and intricate scripts; the liminal rituals of social gatekeeping; the fear for blunders; the obsession with precedence. Interrogating the complex relationship between historical etiquette and adjacent notions of politeness, conduct, morality, convention, and ritual, the study prompts questions on gender stereotyping and class privilege surrounding the present-day etiquette revival. Through adopting a unique comparative approach and a corpus-based methodology this study seeks to revitalise our understandings of etiquette. This book will be of interest to scholars of historical linguistics and pragmatics, as well as those in neighbouring fields such as literary criticism, gender studies and family life, domestic and urban spaces.
Indian Englishes in the Twenty-First Century
English fulfils important intra- and international functions in 21st century India. However, the country's size in terms of area, population, and linguistic diversity means that completely uniform developments in Indian English (IndE) are unlikely. Using sophisticated corpus-linguistic and statistical methods, this Element explores the unity and diversity of IndE by providing studies of selected lexical and morphosyntactic features that characterise Indian English(es) in the 21st century. The findings indicate a degree of incipient 'supralocalisation', i.e. a spread of features beyond their place of origin, cutting through the typological Indo-Aryan vs. Dravidian divide.
Multimodality and Translanguaging in Video Interactions
This Element presents and critically discusses video-mediated communication by combining theories and empirical methods of multimodal studies and translanguaging. Since Covid-19 gained momentum, video-based interactions have become more and more ingrained in private and public lives and to the point of being fully incorporated in a wide range of community practices in personal, work and educational environments. The meaning making of video communication results from the complex, situationally based and culturally influenced and interlaced components of different semiotic resources and practices. These include the use of speech, writing, translingual practices, gaze behaviour, proxemics and kinesics patterns, as well as forms of embodied interaction. The Element aims at unpacking these resources and at interpreting how they make meanings to improve and encourage active and responsible participation in the current digital scenarios.
Translation as Creative-Critical Practice
In Translation as Creative-Critical Practice, Delphine Grass questions the separation between practice and theory in translation studies through her analysis of creative-critical translation experiments. Focusing on contemporary literary and artistic engagements with translation such as the autotheoretical translation memoir, performative translations and 'transtopian' literary and visual art works, this Element argues for a renewed engagement with translation theory from the point of view of translation as artistic and practice-based research capable of reframing translation theory. Exploring examples of translation as both a norm-breaking and world-making activity in the works of Kate Briggs, Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi, No矇mie Grunenwald, Anne Carson, Charles Bernstein, Chantal Wright or Slavs and Tatars to name a few, this Element prompts us to reconsider the current place of translation practice in translation studies.
New Perspectives on Language Mobility
The diffusion of English and the increasing mediatization of our globalized world have significant impacts on our perceptions of language and culture. Beginning with an overview of how the conceptualization of language is currently debated in sociolinguistics and related fields, this book highlights the need for a new perspective on language mobility. Through examining the use of English on German radio morning shows, the book explores the dynamics of language use in times of accelerated globalization and provides insights into how the media operate within the global flows of messages and linguistic resources that characterize our mediatized societies. In doing so, it demonstrates how combining the different perspectives of a sociolinguistics of mobility and contact linguistics allows for a thorough investigation of language practices in society, and advances the theoretical and practical approaches to the study of language mobility as a result.
The Art and Science of Language Teaching
This user-friendly book is designed for language teachers of all levels and languages who seek to inform their classroom practices with current research findings on second language acquisition. Ideal for courses on second language learning and teaching, teacher reading groups, and professional development workshops, each chapter begins with a story of a real teaching scenario and a concise summary of what cutting-edge language teaching research says (and what it does not say) about the topic. Throughout the twenty-one chapters, the authors connect language research to the classroom, challenge misunderstandings around language pedagogy, and provide solutions. Each chapter concludes with classroom activities, and instructional strategies that can be used immediately in professional development workshops or in the classroom. Additional resources are available online to supplement the activities found in the book. Applicable across all languages and levels, this book is suitable for teachers of diverse backgrounds teaching in diverse contexts.
Police Interrogation, Language, and the Law
Recent calls for justice reform have put a spotlight on how the police enforce the law in the United States. How a person's constitutional rights may be legally thwarted during police interrogation, however, has not been part of any meaningful discussion on police reform. This novel book examines the intersections of the law and policing discourse through the detailed analysis of a large corpus of United States federal court rulings, starting with Miranda v. Arizona (1966). It covers a wide range of topics, including the history of police interrogation in the United States, the role of federal law in handicapping a person's ability to invoke their right to counsel, and the invocation game of police interrogation that may lead a variety of suspects to change their discursive preferences. It highlights the need for American police interrogation reform, exploring the paths taken by other jurisdictions outside of the United States. This title is part of the Flip it Open programme and may also be available on open access. Check our website, Cambridge Core, for details.
Step by Step
This collection of essays presents an up-to-date overview of research in the minimalist program of linguistic theory. The book includes a new essay by Noam Chomsky as well as original contributions from other renowned linguists.This collection of essays presents an up-to-date overview of research in the minimalist program of linguistic theory. The book includes a new essay by Noam Chomsky as well as original contributions from other renowned linguists.ContributorsAndrew Barss, Zeljko Boskovic, Noam Chomsky, Hamida Demirdache, Hiroto Hoshi, Kyle Johnson, Roger Martin, Keiko Murasugi, Javier Ormazabal, Mamoru Saito, Daiko Takahashi, Juan Uriagereka, Myriam Uribe-Extebarria, Ewa Willim
A Semiotics of Muslimness in China
This Element examines the semiotics of Sino-Muslim heritage literacy in a way that integrates its Perso-Arabic textual qualities with broader cultural semiotic forms. Using data from images of the linguistic landscape of Sino-Muslim life alongside interviews with Sino-Muslims about their heritage, the author examines how signs of 'Muslimness' are displayed and manipulated in both covert and overt means in different contexts. In so doing the author offers a 'semiotics of Muslimness' in China and considers how forms of language and materiality have the power to inspire meanings and identifications for Sino-Muslims and understanding of their heritage literacy. The author employs theoretical tools from linguistic anthropology and an understanding of semiotic assemblage to demonstrate how signifiers of Chinese Muslimness are invoked to substantiate heritage and Sino-Muslim identity constructions even when its expression must be covert, liminal, and unconventional.
Pragmatics and Emotion
It has long been received wisdom in semantics and pragmatics that 'the head' and 'the heart' are two opposing forces, a view that has led scholars, until now, to explore the mental processes behind cognition, and the mental processes behind emotion, as two separate entities. This bold, innovative book challenges this view, and provides an original study of how we communicate our emotions through language, drawing on both pragmatic theory and affective science. It begins with the assumption that emotional or expressive meaning plays such a central role in human interaction that any pragmatic theory worth its salt must account for it. It meets the associated challenges head-on and strives to integrate affect within one theory of utterance interpretation, showing that emotional meaning and rationality/reasoning can be analysed within one framework. Written in a clear and concise style, it is essential reading for anyone interested in communication and emotion.
A Semiotics of Muslimness in China
This Element examines the semiotics of Sino-Muslim heritage literacy in a way that integrates its Perso-Arabic textual qualities with broader cultural semiotic forms. Using data from images of the linguistic landscape of Sino-Muslim life alongside interviews with Sino-Muslims about their heritage, the author examines how signs of 'Muslimness' are displayed and manipulated in both covert and overt means in different contexts. In so doing the author offers a 'semiotics of Muslimness' in China and considers how forms of language and materiality have the power to inspire meanings and identifications for Sino-Muslims and understanding of their heritage literacy. The author employs theoretical tools from linguistic anthropology and an understanding of semiotic assemblage to demonstrate how signifiers of Chinese Muslimness are invoked to substantiate heritage and Sino-Muslim identity constructions even when its expression must be covert, liminal, and unconventional.
Comparing Gendered Language in English and German. A Study of Pronouns and Job Titles on Linguee
Seminar paper from the year 2023 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2.7, University of Heidelberg, course: Psychology of Language, language: English, abstract: This study aims to compare gendered language in English and German, focusing on the use of pronouns and job titles, and to analyze the results using the corpus data from Linguee, a widely used online translation tool. By examining gendered language in two languages with different grammatical systems and cultural backgrounds, this study can provide insights into the similarities and differences in gendered language use and its potential impact on gender equality. Its findings may also have implications for language teaching and learning, particularly for language learners who are not familiar with gendered language and its implications. Finally, the study can contribute to a better understanding of the complex relationship between language and gender, a topic that has received increasing attention from scholars in various disciplines. This study aims to answer the following research question: How does gendered language in pronouns and job titles compare between English and German, and what are the implications of these differences for promoting gender equality? To answer this question, the study will analyze the use of pronouns and job titles in English and German using corpus data from Linguee. It will focus on identifying and comparing gendered language patterns in both languages and interpreting their potential implications for gender equality.
Indian Englishes in the Twenty-First Century
English fulfils important intra- and international functions in 21st century India. However, the country's size in terms of area, population, and linguistic diversity means that completely uniform developments in Indian English (IndE) are unlikely. Using sophisticated corpus-linguistic and statistical methods, this Element explores the unity and diversity of IndE by providing studies of selected lexical and morphosyntactic features that characterise Indian English(es) in the 21st century. The findings indicate a degree of incipient 'supralocalisation', i.e. a spread of features beyond their place of origin, cutting through the typological Indo-Aryan vs. Dravidian divide.
Multimodality and Translanguaging in Video Interactions
This Element presents and critically discusses video-mediated communication by combining theories and empirical methods of multimodal studies and translanguaging. Since Covid-19 gained momentum, video-based interactions have become more and more ingrained in private and public lives and to the point of being fully incorporated in a wide range of community practices in personal, work and educational environments. The meaning making of video communication results from the complex, situationally based and culturally influenced and interlaced components of different semiotic resources and practices. These include the use of speech, writing, translingual practices, gaze behaviour, proxemics and kinesics patterns, as well as forms of embodied interaction. The Element aims at unpacking these resources and at interpreting how they make meanings to improve and encourage active and responsible participation in the current digital scenarios.
Merge and the Strong Minimalist Thesis
The goal of this contribution to the Elements series is to closely examine Merge, its form, its function, and its central role in current linguistic theory. It explores what it does (and does not do), why it has the form it has, and its development over time. The basic idea behind Merge is quite simple. However, Merge interacts, in intricate ways, with other components including the language's interfaces, laws of nature, and certain language-specific conditions. Because of this, and because of its fundamental place in the human faculty of language, this Element's focus on Merge provides insights into the goals and development of generative grammar more generally, and its prospects for the future.
Coordinate Structures
In a coordination construction, which is universally available, two or more syntactic constituents are combined, with or without an overt coordinator. This Element examines how coordinate structures are derived syntactically, focussing on the syntactic operations involved, including constraints on both their operations and the representations they produce. Specifically, considering the recent research development in the syntax of coordination, the Element discusses whether any special syntactic operation is required to derive various coordinate constructions, including constructions in which each conjunct has a gap, whether there is any special functional category heading coordinate constructions in general, what the morphosyntactic statuses of coordinators (i.e., conjunctions and disjunctions) are in some specific languages, whether the structure of a coordinate construction can be beyond the binary complementation structure, and whether the mobility of conjuncts and the mobility of elements in conjuncts require any construction-specific constraint on syntactic operations.
Critical Applied Linguistics
This highly accessible, up-to-date introduction provides an overview of critical applied linguistics through an intersectionality framework. The book reflects recent developments through a discussion and evaluation of key questions, diverse perspectives, and practices for social change.
