News
20 July 2010
- Conference: LSSA Conference 2010
- Conference: 1st International Linguistic Conference in Warsaw
- Conference: Linguistics and the Arts & Humanities
- Conference: Referential Expressions and Text Coherence at the Onset of School Age
- Conference: Quantitative Investigations in Theoretical Linguistics
- Conference: Sociophonetics, at the Crossroads of Speech Variation, Processing and Communication
- Book: The Expression of Negation
- Book: European Vernacular Literacy
- Book: English Linguistics
- Review: Cross-linguistic Semantics of Tense, Aspect, and Modality
- Review: Indian English14 July 2010
- Conference: LSSA Conference 2010
- Book: Tertiary Language Learning
- Book: What children know about communication
- Conference: Pragmatic Aspects of Discourse Coherence IPrA Panel
- Book: Corpora and Language Teaching
- Book: The Discourse of Court Interpreting
- Book Review: How Words Mean
- Book Review: Exploring Translation Theories
- Book Reviewers Wanted: Book Reviewers needed for Teachers College
- Book: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language06 July 2010
- Catalog: New Publications Catalog
- Book: Sociolinguistics and Language Education
- Conference: Doing Research in Applied Linguistics
- Review: Corpora (Pragmatics and Discourse)
- Conference: The Grammar of Proper Names - A Typological Perspective
- Book: English Grammar
- Book: Syntactic Categories
- Workshop: What is a Context? Theoretical and Experimental Evidence
- Review: Degrammaticalization
- Course: Terminology and Resource Harmonisation
Conference: LSSA Conference 2010
For more information about the up and coming conference, please go to our 2010 conference
page.
Conference: 1st International Linguistic Conference in Warsaw
Date: 19 to 21 October 2010
Location: Warsaw, Poland
Contact: Maja Kittel
Call Deadline: 15 August 2010The main topics of the conference are: teaching and teaching methods, translation, applied linguistics, theoretical linguistics, as well as possible practical applications of new psychological, philosophical and cognitive theories of language.
The official languages of the conference are English and Polish. We invite you to submit abstracts in Polish or English (no longer than 1000 characters).
Conference: Linguistics and the Arts & Humanities
Date: 12 to 13 November 2010
Location: Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada
Contact: Anne FurlongIt is clear that linguistics has a great deal to offer the Arts and Humanities: 'it is the responsibility of linguists to better educate the... members of other professions' (Isac & Reiss, 2008, p. 309). However, this responsibility requires that we as linguists recognize the critical distinctions between their views of language and our own. We invite proposals, in English or French, for papers focusing on the contributions of linguistics to the humanities, the arts, or the performing arts, as well as the potential offered by literary texts for
study within linguistics.No scholarly endeavour takes place outside language. Nowhere is this more evident than in literature, philosophy, history, religious studies or the performing arts: all take some aspect of language use as their object of study. It is clear that linguistics has a great deal to offer the Arts and Humanities: 'it is the responsibility of linguists to better educate the... members of other professions' (Isac & Reiss, 2008, p. 309). However, this responsibility requires that we as linguists recognize the critical distinctions between their views of language and our own. Conversely, the creative uses of language as pursued in the arts and humanities provide linguists with cross-cultural and diachronic data. Drama, prose and verse demonstrate the constraints and the possibilities of language, and can thus enrich the data with which linguists work.
We invite proposals, in English or French, for papers focusing on the contributions of linguistics to the humanities, the arts, or the performing arts, as well as the potential offered by literary texts for study within linguistics. Proposals for papers treating other areas of linguistics are also welcome, and graduate students are especially encouraged to submit.
Presentations will be 20 minutes long followed by a 10-minute question period. Abstracts should be no more than 300 words in length, excluding title and references, and must be submitted no later than Monday, August 20, 2010.
Abstracts must be submitted via e-mail to apla34@upei.ca as a separate
attachment (Word). Abstracts using IPA fonts should be submitted as a PDF. In
the subject field of the e-mail enter: APLA 34 Abstract Submission. In the body
of the e-mail, include only the following information:
1. Title of the paper
2. Name(s) of the presenter(s)
3. Department and affiliation
4. Student or non-student
5. E-mail address, phone and fax numbers (where possible)
6. Audio-visual needs
7. The session the abstract is for:
a) The general APLA conference
b) The special theme
Abstracts will be anonymously peer-reviewed. Replies will be sent by mid-September.Conference: Referential Expressions and Text Coherence at the Onset of School Age
Date: 23 to 25 February 2011
Location: Göttingen, Germany
Contact: Dagmar BittnerWhen starting school, children are expected to produce and comprehend complex texts. Psycholinguists, however, argue that children have not fully acquired the target range and functions of discourse cohesive means up to the age of 8 or even later. Considerably consistent claims have been made on when children acquire which knowledge and capabilities. At the same time, we are faced with great variation in the types of investigated discourse and research methods.
Considering referential expressions (RE), there is, for instance, a debate on when and how children comprehend the discourse functions of definite vs. indefinite noun phrases. Experimental research (e.g. Schafer & de Viliers 2000) and studies of narrative data (e.g. Hickmann 2003) report an overuse of definite noun phrases until the age of 7. In contrast, studies of spontaneous speech do not report replacement of indefinite by definite noun phrases. Furthermore, experimental and narrative studies propose that children up to age 5 do not make anaphoric use of RE (e.g. Karmiloff-Smith 1981, 1985). According to these
studies, definite noun phrases and demonstrative pronouns are used only deictically. This is mainly explained by deficits in theory of mind: young children are not able to take into account perspective and knowledge of their communication partners. Contrary to this, studies of pre-linguistic children (Tomasello 2009, Carpenter 2009) and early spontaneous speech (Matthews et al. 2006, Bittner 2007) found that children, to some extent, build a representation of their partner's cognitive status and interact appropriately.Focusing on RE, the workshop aims at discussing how to integrate the different results and perspectives with a realistic picture of children's knowledge on means of text coherence at the onset of school time. We invite studies dealing with production and comprehension of RE in mono- and multilingual acquisition up to the age of 6, and especially encourage work focusing on:
- Same type(s) of RE in different types of discourse, e.g. longitudinal
vs.experimental data
- Same type(s) of RE investigated by different research methods, e.g. types of
experiments
- Consistency or change of oppositions between RE in different types of discourse.Papers should contribute to answering the following questions:
- Which knowledge on RE do children process at which developmental stage?
- Which system of RE do they have at the onset of school age?
- What is the impact of different types of discourse (including context
situation) on the treatment of RE?
- Are there 'complexity' limits for processing the full knowledge on a RE?
- Of what type are such limits?Conference: Quantitative Investigations in Theoretical Linguistics
Date: 28 to 31 March 2011
Location: Berlin, Germany
Contact: Amir Zeldes
Call Deadline: 15 November 2010Quantitative Investigations in Theoretical Linguistics (QITL) offers a forum for researchers approaching problems in theoretical linguistics from a quantitative point of view. The conference offers a platform for diverse areas of linguistics, from phonology through morphology, syntax, semantics or pragmatics, in both corpus-based, psycholinguistic/experimental or computational methodologies approaching problems in grammar, first and second language acquisition, historical linguistics and more.
Conference: Sociophonetics, at the Crossroads of Speech Variation, Processing and Communication
Date: 14 to 15 December 2010
Location: Pisa, Italy
Contact: Chiara Celata
Call Deadline: 15 September 2010Sociophonetics is currently emerging as a research field with a growing agenda and an assortment of research directions. It focuses on the relationships between phonetic/phonological form and social, regional and interactional/communicative factors, with a particular interest in the implications of speech variation on theories of language change.
Beside the variationist approach to speech production, recent sociophonetic studies are also concerned with the effects of variation on speech perception, phonological categorisation, speaker and self identification, speech accommodation in production. By means of an intense exchange with other subdisciplines of linguistic and cognitive sciences, sociophonetics is also devoted to acquisition, processing, mental representation and transmission of socially conditioned phonetic variation. Ethnographic approaches to individuals' social worlds, on the other hand, have revealed that social meaning is much more nuanced than predetermined social categorization would suggest, and promoted reliance on locally relevant social categories. Even though many important questions about those phonetic parameters that can act as social indicators have been successfully addressed (though with relatively little effort beyond English), several issues concerning both theoretical grounding and methodological preferences of sociophonetic studies are still open for further discussion.
The workshop aims at gathering scholars working on different aspects of sociophonetic, phonetic and sociolinguistic variation, to create an informal atmosphere for critical debate on a range of relevant topics such as (but not limited to):
- Dimensions of sociophonetic variation: sociolinguistic variables for the construction of socioindexical phonological categories; clustering of variables within a linguistic community
- Instrumental techniques for sociophonetics research: the role of experimental phonetics for an explicit definition of crucial notions in variationist phonetics and phonology (e.g., the relationship between speech rate, style, register, hyper-/hypo-articulation etc. in connected speech)
- Perceptual dialectology, accent recognition, speakers' judgment about the indexical properties of variation in the speech signal
- Dialectology, historical linguistics and their contribution to sociophonetic research
- Sociophonetics and sociolinguistics: is current sociophonetics of any help in answering some critical issues of sociolinguistic research (e.g., the qualitative vs. quantitative evaluation of variables; the Observer's Paradox; the limits of experimental settings vs. naturalist informal observations of speakers' behavior)? Are theoretical and methodological improvements possible/envisaged/needed in sociophonetic research? What are the possible contributions of past and present sociolinguistics to that purpose?
- Sociophonetics and phonological theory.Book: The Expression of Negation
Negation is a sine qua non of every human language but is absent from otherwise complex systems of animal communication. In many ways, it is negation that makes us human, imbuing us with the capacity to deny, to contradict, to misrepresent, to lie, and to convey irony. The apparent simplicity of logical negation as a one-place operator that toggles truth and falsity belies the intricate complexity of the expression of negation in natural
language. Not only do we find negative adverbs, verbs, copulas, quantifiers, and affixes, but the interaction of negation with other operators (including multiple iterations of negation itself) can be exceedingly complex to describe, extending (as first detailed by Otto Jespersen) to negative concord, negative incorporation, and the widespread occurrence of negative polarity items whose distribution is subject to principles of syntax, semantics, and
pragmatics. The chapters in this book survey the patterning of negative utterances in natural languages, spanning such foundational issues as how negative sentences are realized cross-linguistically and how that realization tends to change over time, how negation is acquired by children, how it is processed by adults, and how its expression changes over time. Specific chapters offer focused empirical studies of negative polarity, pleonastic
negation, and negative/quantifier scope interaction, as well as detailed examinations of the form and function of sentential negation in modern Romance languages and Classical Japanese.
Editor: Laurence R HornBook: European Vernacular Literacy
In this major new text, Joshua Fishman charts the rise of vernacular literacy in Europe, and the major social, economic, religious, political, demographic, educational and philosophical changes that attended it. Following the story up until the present day, the book examines the people who became leaders of the growth of vernacular literacy in Europe, and looks at how European colonizers viewed vernacular literacy efforts in their current and former colonies. Looking forward, Fishman discusses how new technology affects vernacular literacy both now and in the present, and whether developments in voice and visual media
mean that vernacular literacy will be less important to future generations than it is to us. 'European Vernacular Literacy' is not only a review of well-known facts and theories of the rise of vernacular literacy in Europe, but an attempt to reintegrate and rethink them along new and provocative lines, meaning that the book will be of interest not only to students of literacy and history but also to scholars interested in Fishman's latest contribution to sociolinguistics.
Author: Joshua A FishmanBook: English Linguistics
The book introduces the reader to the central areas of English linguistics. The main sections are: the English language and linguistics - sounds - meaning- carrying units - sentences: models of grammar - meaning - utterances - variation. Notably, the book is written from a foreign student's perspective of the English language, i.e. aspects relevant to foreign language teaching receive particular attention. A great deal of emphasis is put on the insights to be gained from the analysis of corpora, especially with respect to the
idiomatic character of language (idiom principle, valency approach). In addition, the text offers basic facts about the history of the language and elaborates on the differences between British and American English.
The author demonstrates that a linguistic fact can usually be described in more than one way. To this end, each section contains a chapter written for beginners providing a broad outline and introducing the basic terminology. The remaining chapters in each section highlight linguistic facts in more detail and give an idea of how particular theories account for them.
Author: Thomas HerbstReview: Cross-linguistic Semantics of Tense, Aspect, and Modality
This book results from the TAM TAM: Cross-linguistic semantics of Tense, Aspect, and Modality workshop held in Nijmegen in November 2006, which brought together semanticists with a cross-linguistic perspective and typologists interested in semantic theory to focus on cross-linguistic variation in systems of tense, aspect and mood/modality (TAM). It contains 15 papers and an index. Each paper contains its own set of references.
The book is well edited; the few typos and infelicities that I found are not unduly distracting or confusing. The structure of the volume that the editors outline in paper 1 is a useful guide to the flow of its contents, which proceeds from an examination of tense and aspect, primarily the latter, to mood and modality, again primarily the latter. It would have been helpful, however, if the editors had addressed the distinction between mood and modality. They implicitly treat realis and irrealis as modals, but paper 7 avoids the issue by
calling them 'markers'. In the literature, one can find them described both as modals (Roberts 1990) and as moods (Deen & Hyams 2002). The discussion in paper 7 leads me to conclude that they are, if anything, moods.
Editors: Lotte Hogeweg, Helen de Hoop, and Andrej MalchukovPublisher: John Benjamins
Review: Indian English
This book treats linguistic and socio-cultural aspects of English as it is used in India. It is an important contribution to the Edinburgh University Press series 'Dialects of English', which documents varieties of English worldwide. In India's multilingual setting, English plays a significant role in communication, literature, business and elsewhere. Though English first came to India with the British, in the last four hundred years it has become an indispensable part of Indian society. This volume contextualizes research on Indian English by using a
good selection of sample texts, from conversational to literary. The book is organized into seven interesting, well-illustrated chapters, discussing phonetics, phonology, morphosyntax, lexis, discourse and other issues related to English used in India. It also contains a survey of previous research and an annotated bibliography on Indian English.
This book presents a well-written description of English used in India. 'Indian English' is undoubtedly a must-have textbook for newcomers to this area of study. It is also accessible to people outside of linguistics due to its clear and basic approach to the topic and limited use of technical vocabulary. On the other hand, a limited use of IPA symbols makes it less useful to some advanced researchers in this area.
Author: Sailaja PingaliPublisher: Edinburgh University Press
Book: Tertiary Language Learning
Tertiary Language Learning deals with L2 learning by advanced learners in an instructed context. This volume surveys recent developments in Second Language.
Acquisition and attempts to create a coherent pedagogical framework - Scenario-based Learning - developed as a response to changes in language teaching. Scenario-based Learning integrates insights from genre analysis and skills-based English for Specific Purpose teaching. It aims at helping tertiary-level language learners to manage their own learning, to master the genres appropriate to their studies and to acquire intercultural, pragmatic competence.
Author: Veronica Smith-ZimaBook: What children know about communication
What do children know about communication? In the increasingly globalized world we live in, nowadays children more often come into contact with multiple languages at different ages and in variable contexts. Consequently, they may at times be required to communicate in situations in which they lack sufficient understanding of the language used. In international schools, these exolingual situations of communication are the order of the day. Knowing about communication, that is, being aware of the interaction, of the potential obstacles and of different strategies to overcome them, is essential to bring exolingual situations of communication to a successful end. Are there features of language acquisition that affect
the development of this facet of metacognitive awareness? In this thesis a specific aspect of early plurilingualism is examined in detail. Reactions of children who learned a new language at an age and in a context in which they were able to be conscious about their learning are compared to those of children who learned a new language in a less conscious way, from birth onwards. Results demonstrate that a conscious language learning experience
is a relevant factor in the development of this aspect of metacognitive awareness in children.
Author: Emmanuelle Le Pichon VorstmanConference: Pragmatic Aspects of Discourse Coherence IPrA Panel
Date: 03 to 08 July 2011
Location: Manchester, United Kingdom
Contact: Helmet GruberInvestigations of discourse coherence have played an important role in discourse research for at least the last three decades. Within this research tradition, the investigation of coherence relations has lead to the proposal of various coherence models which view coherence as the result of an interplay between textual clues, (analysts' assumptions of) writers'/ speakers' intentions, cognitive, situational, rhetorical and/ or generic
constraints etc. (Asher & Lascarides, 2003; Spooren & Sanders, 2008; Taboada & Mann, 2006a, 2006b).
Despite the long tradition of coherence research, there is still disagreement concerning basic questions such the relationship between generic structures and coherence structures (to which extent do they depend on each other or are they independent of each other?), the relation between signals of surface cohesion (e.g. theme-rheme structures, lexical
cohesion) and 'underlying' coherence structures, the signaling of coherence structures on different text/ discourse levels (global vs. local coherence), etc. In addition, the emergence of new genres in the new media and the possibility of combining different semiotic modes in hypertexts calls for new approaches that also take into account coherence relations between
different modes of discourse such as coherence between visual and verbal elements of texts (see Bateman, 2008) or coherence between sound, film sequences, and verbal and textual elements (Huemer, 2010).The proposed panel aims at bringing together researchers from different approaches to relational coherence, in order to present and discuss their recent research. We envisage two 90-minute sessions with three presentations each and room for discussion. One of the sessions will focus specifically on multimodality.
Presentations are invited on the following topics:
-coherence, cohesion, and genre
-signalling of coherence relations
-coherence in multimodal discourse.Book: Corpora and Language Teaching
The articles in this edited volume represent a broad coverage of areas. They discuss the role and effectiveness of corpora and corpus-linguistic techniques for language teaching but also deal with broader issues such as the relationship between corpora and second language teaching and how the different perspectives of foreign language teachers and applied linguists can be reconciled. A number of concrete examples are given of how authentic
corpus material can be used for different learning activities in the classroom. It is also shown how specific learner problems for example in the area of phraseology can be studied on the basis of learner corpora and textbook corpora. On the basis of learner corpora of speech and writing it is further shown that even advanced learners of English are uncertain about stylistic and text type differences.
Editor: Karin AijmerBook: The Discourse of Court Interpreting
This book explores the intricacies of court interpreting through a thorough analysis of the authentic discourse of the English-speaking participants, the Spanish-speaking witnesses and the interpreters. Written by a practitioner, educator and researcher, the book presents the reader with real issues that most court interpreters face during their work and shows through the results of careful research studies that interpreter's choices can have varying
degrees of influence on the triadic exchange. It aims to raise the practitioners' awareness of the significance of their choices and attempts to provide a theoretical basis for interpreters to make informed decisions rather than intuitive ones. It also suggests solutions for common problems. The book highlights the complexities of court interpreting and argues for thorough training for practicing interpreters to improve their performance as well as for better understanding of their task from the legal profession. Although the data is drawn from Spanish-English cases, the main results can be extended to any language combination. The book is written in a clear, accessible language and is aimed at practicing interpreters, students and educators of interpreting, linguists and legal professionals.Book Review: How Words Mean
''How Words Mean'' is an ambitious attempt to integrate different cognitive approaches to semantics and grammar under the roof of a ''Theory of Lexical Concepts and Cognitive Models'' (LCCM Theory). Evans intends to demonstrate that meaning is a construct emerging in utterances through situated language use. The book is organized in five parts, each part with a short introduction. The whole book is subdivided into 16 chapters, each again with introduction and summary. This is helpful as it enables the reader to quickly skip through the book and select parts of particular interest. Evans (xii) states that he has four different readers in mind, (a) the general linguist, (b) the (general) cognitive scientist, (c) the cognitive linguist, and finally (d) the ''educated lay reader''. This classification is fitting, although (unavoidably, and perfectly understandably) each of these target groups will tend to skip certain known aspects, while experiencing some of the chapters as challenging, even difficult.
But they will be rewarded with interesting and inspiring thoughts in this book. Basically, Evans integrates ideas presented by other researchers such as Lakoff & Johnson (1980, 1999), Langacker (1987), Croft (2002), Goldberg (2006) and others. Evans carefully and diligently presents those theories and integrates them into his personal conclusions, while adding new aspects.
In sum, ''How Words Mean'' is an inspiring contemporary account of semantic and
cognitive issues that is worth reading.
Author: Vyvyan EvansPublisher: Oxford University Press
Book Review: Exploring Translation Theories
Anthony Pym's 186-page textbook offers an informative but succinct tour of the main trajectories of translation theory from the traditional, equivalence-based approaches to the currently fashionable perspectives on ''cultural translation''.
With the inclusion of ''Suggested projects and activities'' at the end of each chapter, a 12-page bibliography and a subject and author index, this book will serve well as a university textbook, a guide for self-study or even a straightforward introduction to the field.
If we are to search for a use for this paradigm, it would most likely be found
in the emphasis some of its scholars have put on translators themselves. This kind of Translation Sociology (p. 154-156) is probably overdue in the field. Taken alongside the emphasis on the purpose(s) of translation examined in functional theories and the tools that scholars such as Balci (2008) and Eraslan Gercek (2008) have used to examine the roles of interpreters in social situations, such descriptions could form an important part of our knowledge of the social importance of translators.
Author: Anthony PymPublisher: Routledge (Taylor and Francis)
Book Reviewers Wanted: Book Reviewers needed for Teachers College
Book Reviewers Needed for Teachers College, Columbia University Working Papers in TESOL & Applied Linguistics
The following six books are available for review for the TESOL/AL Web Journal:
1) Bachman, L. & Palmer, A. (2010). Language assessment in practice.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2) Kramsch, C. (2009). The multilingual subject. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
3) Cruz-Ferreira, M. (Ed.) (2010). Multilingual norms. Frankfort am Main:
Peter Lang.
4) de Bot, K. & Schrauf, R. W. (Eds.) (2009). Language development over the
lifespan. New York: Routledge.
5) Cook, G. (2010). Translation in language teaching. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
6) Edge, J. & Garton, S. (2009). From experience to knowledge in ELT.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
If you would like to review any of these books for the Web Journal, please contact me at scc2120@columbia.edu with a one- or two-paragraph summary describing your qualifications as a reviewer, including your subject areas of interest. Please also send your mailing address/phone number. Be sure to specify which book you are interested in reviewing.
We also accept reviews for books not listed above. If you are interested in reviewing other books for the Web Journal, you may submit a proposal detailing the book information. Books must be current and relevant to TESOL or Applied Linguistics.Book: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language
This new, thoroughly revised edition of the acclaimed Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language incorporates the major developments in language study which have taken place since the mid 1990s. Two main new areas have been added: the rise of electronic communication in all its current forms from email to texting, and the crisis affecting the world's languages, of
which half are thought to be so seriously endangered that they will die out this
century.
- All language statistics have been updated, and additional information provided about their linguistic affiliation
- All topics involving technology have been revised to take account of recent developments, notably in phonetics, language disability, and computing
- Maps have been revised to include new countries or country names - Special attention has been paid to fast-moving areas such as language teaching and learning
- The text design has been completely updated with many new illustrations
throughout.
Author: David CrystalCatalog: New Publications Catalog
De Gruyter Mouton is very pleased to present the new publications catalog for 2010/11 in a new online format.
The new online catalogue offers, among many other features:
- An easy, built-in search function
- Various viewing settings (presentation, magazine, or paper view)
- Convenient browsing functionBook: Sociolinguistics and Language Education
This book, addressed to experienced and novice language educators, provides an up-to-date overview of sociolinguistics, reflecting changes in the global situation and the continuing evolution of the field and its relevance to language education around the world. Topics covered include nationalism and popular culture, style and identity, creole languages, critical language awareness, gender and ethnicity, multimodal literacies, classroom discourse, and ideologies and power. Whether considering the role of English as an international language or innovative initiatives in Indigenous language revitalization, in every context of the world sociolinguistic perspectives highlight the fluid and flexible use of language in communities and classrooms, and the importance of teacher practices that open up spaces of awareness and acceptance of -and access to- the widest possible communicative repertoire for students.
Editors: Nancy H. Hornberger and Sandra Lee McKayConference: Doing Research in Applied Linguistics
Date: 21 to 22 April 2011
Location: Bangkok, Thailand
Contact Person: Asst. Prof. Dr. Wareesiri SinghasiriAs applied linguistics matures as an academic field, the range and variety of areas of interest are expanding rapidly, perhaps to the extent that the field is in danger of becoming fragmented. Research provides a common language for applied linguists from different sub-fields, with research approaches and research issues applicable to all applied linguists irrespective of their specific field of interest. The goal of this conference is to share and learn about a variety of aspects of doing research in applied linguistics, including:
- Purposes and uses of research in applied linguistics
- Research paradigms and their applications
- Issues in data collection and analysis
- Experiences of research and development as a researcherThe conference will include papers (30 minutes), poster presentations, and a forum for novice researchers.
Papers should focus on research issues, rather than subject area issues. For example, papers could discuss the appropriacy of a particular research paradigm, problems and solutions in data analysis, or the ways in which conducting research affected teaching. Papers can report findings concerning the subject area, but should at least include a substantial discussion of issues concerning conducting research. Abstracts of 150-200 words should be sent. Some timeslots will be reserved for papers by current PhD students to encourage dissemination of research issues relating to PhDs.
Abstracts for poster presentation should be 100-150 words.
There will be a forum for novice researchers (e.g. prospective PhD students, teachers wishing to do research). Presenters will speak for up to 10 minutes and then receive feedback from the audience. Proposals for the novice researcher forum should be 100-150 words.Review: Corpora (Pragmatics and Discourse)
Corpus-based approaches have been used to study many facets of language structure, particularly in recent years; however, as editors Andreas H. Jucker, Daniel Schreier and Marianne Hundt point out in the introduction to this volume, ''the potential of corpus linguistics has not yet been fully explored for either discourse analysis or pragmatics'' (5). Only a relatively small number of scholars working in pragmatics, for instance, have used large-scale corpora for analysis, and the starting point for such studies has typically been ''either a discourse particle with a fixed form that can easily be retrieved from a large corpus, or a speech function that is generally realized in a small number of variant patterns'' (4). Thus, the editors propose that ''the time is right to encourage and promote more systematic cooperation between researchers investigating pragmatics and discourse on the one hand and those working with corpus-linguistic methods on the other'' (6). As a way of showcasing current research being done along these lines, ''Corpora: Pragmatics and Discourse''
presents 22 papers from the 29th International Conference on English Language
Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 29), which was held in Ascona,
Switzerland, in May 2008.
''Corpora: Pragmatics and Discourse'' is a remarkable volume, presenting studies that should appeal to newcomers to corpus-based research in pragmatics and discourse as well as those who have already conducted this kind of research and want to stay informed of current approaches.
Editors: Jucker, Andreas H.; Schreier, Daniel; Hundt, MariannePublisher: Rodopi
Conference: The Grammar of Proper Names - A Typological Perspective
Date: 07 to 08 October 2010
Location: Regensburg, Germany
Contact: Johannes Helmbrecht johannes.helmbrecht@sprachlit.uni-regensburg.deInternational conference on the 'Grammar of Proper Names - A Typological Perspective' to be held at the University of Regensburg, Germany on October,
7-8 2010.
This is to notify the linguistic community that there will be a conference on 'The Grammar of Proper Names - A Typological Perspective' to be held at the University of Regensburg, Germany in October, 7-8, 2010.
This site contains all information on the general topic and theoretical background of the conference, the location, the programme, accommodation, etc.
There are no conference fees. Participants are kindly asked to register.Book: English Grammar
Looking for an easy-to-use guide to English grammar? This handy introduction covers all the basics of the subject, using a simple and straightforward style. Students will find the book's step-by-step approach easy to follow and be encouraged by its non-technical language. Requiring no prior knowledge of English grammar, the information is presented in small steps, with objective techniques to help readers apply new concepts. With clear explanations and well chosen examples, the book gives students the tools to understand the mysteries of English grammar as well as the perfect foundation from which to move on to more advanced topics.
'... an excellent self-study and reference guide for readers with little or no specialised knowledge of linguistics, but an interest in basic issues of the structure of English. It is specifically designed for readers who suffer from 'grammatophobia', (a fear of grammar), and offers accessible and sound information while keeping the technical jargon to a minimum.' Monika S.
Schmid, University of Groningen.
'Commendable for the clarity of its direct approach, this text presents material in digestible portions. Students will benefit from and appreciate the consistent reinforcement provided by its 'Quick Tips,' practice exercises, and self tests.'
Carolyn Sobel, Ph.D., Professor Emerita, Hofstra University.
Author: Evelyn P. Altenberg and Robert M. VagoBook: Syntactic Categories
This book offers a systematic account of syntactic categories - the building blocks of sentences and the units of grammatical analysis - and explains their place in different theories of language. It sets out and clarifies the conflicting definitions of competing frameworks which frequently make it hard or impossible to compare grammars.
Gisa Rauh describes the history and nature of traditional and contemporary accounts and definitions of grammatical categories. She explains their properties and use in generative, cognitive, and functional theories, and considers their function in language typology. She distinguishes between the cognitive functions of categories that relate to traditional parts of speech and serve to structure a language's lexicon; and those which determine the
syntactic behaviour of the linguistic items they specify.
Professor Rauh illustrates her account with a wide range of examples. Her clear and balanced exposition will be welcomed by students and scholars in all branches of linguistics as well as by those in related subjects such as computational science and the philosophy of language.
Author: Gisa RauhWorkshop: What is a Context? Theoretical and Experimental Evidence
Date: 23 to 25 February 2011
Location: Goettingen, Germany
Contact: Petra Schumacher petra.schumacher@uni-mainz.deWhat is a Context? - Theoretical and Experimental Evidence
Workshop organized as part of the Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS).
Most linguists will agree that 'context' is a fundamental notion for linguistic analysis and theory. But when it comes to pinpoint what exactly a context is, most researchers act reluctantly, i.e. they parameterize their notion according to their empirical or theoretical aims. For example, Bach (2005: 21), in a paper devoted to an attack on so-called contextualists, explains: 'What is loosely called 'context' is the conversational setting broadly construed. It is
the mutual cognitive context, or salient common ground. It includes the current state of the conversation (what has just been said, what has just been referred to, etc.), the physical setting (if the conversants are face to face), salient mutual knowledge between the conversants, and relevant broader common knowledge'. However, such definitions cannot substitute a comprehensive theory of context. The very fact that in recent discussions on
the semantics-pragmatics interface, rivaling camps such as 'minimalists' versus 'contextualists' entertain quite different notions of context and context- dependent meaning, shows that there is a need for in-depth discussion of the notion(s) and theories dealing with context. Even in recent psycho- and neurolinguistic research that is devoted to the semantics-pragmatics interface and pragmatic enrichment, it becomes increasingly clear that aspects of contextual knowledge that should be controlled are in fact not always under
control, this possibly having to do with the 'emergent' character of context.Our workshop aims at bringing together all linguists interested in context research, be it from the perspective of the semantics-pragmatics interface in general, from the conversationalist perspective, from computational linguistics, or from psycho- and neurolinguistics. In particular, we invite contributions that focus on specific aspects of contextual information and
that are geared towards choosing between distinct notions of context.Review: Degrammaticalization
The book under review treats the phenomenon of degrammaticalization, 'the ugly duckling of grammaticalization studies', as the author puts it on p. 1. Degrammaticalization, the process whereby a linguistic unit becomes less grammatical, runs counter to the common assumption that grammaticalization is unidirectional, i.e. that 'there is only left-to-right movement' along the following cline (Hopper & Traugott 2003: 7): content item > grammatical word > clitic > inflectional affix.
Unfortunately, this assumption has sometimes become a dogma rather than a hypothesis subject to empirical testing. Hence the status of degrammaticalization has been rather controversial in the discourse of historical linguistics of the last several decades: some scholars, like Christian Lehmann (1995 [1982]: 16-19), have expressly denied its existence
altogether; others have dismissed it as statistically insignificant (Heine & Kuteva 2002: 11); still others have used extant examples of degrammaticalization as a strong argument against unidirectionality in general (Newmeyer 1998: 263). The aim of Muriel Norde's book is thus twofold. One the one hand, it attempts to define degrammaticalization in a meaningful way and to classify attested examples under the proposed definition. On the other hand, this book provides a critical and informative overview of the major methodological and conceptual
problems faced by contemporary grammaticalization studies, providing a better understanding of the phenomenon of grammaticalization.Muriel Norde's ''Degrammaticalization'' is, in my opinion, among the most important contributions to the field of grammaticalization research published in the last few years, and an indispensable guide not only to the more 'exotic' phenomenon of degrammaticalization, but also a critical and well-informed review of all the major conceptual issues in the study of
grammatical change, as well.
Author: Muriel NordePublisher: Oxford University Press
Course: Terminology and Resource Harmonisation
Date: 13 to 17 September 2010
Location: Bergen, Norway
Contact: Gisle AndersenCLARA researcher training course on integration of terminological language resources across domains and languages
The Department of Professional and Intercultural Communication at NHH will host a one-week PhD training course on methods and technologies for consolidating and integrating terminological resources across domains and languages.
Confirmed Speakers:
- Rita Temmerman, CVC, Erasmushogeschool Brussel (NL)
- Stefan Geissler, Temis (DE)
- Bodil Nistrup Madsen, Copenhagen Business School (DK)
- Andrejs Vasi?jevs, Tilde (LV)
- Bolette Sandford Pedersen, CST (DK)
- Kara Warburton, ISO TC37 (CA)
- Henrik Nilsson, TNC (SE)
- Marita Kristiansen, NHH (NO)Aim and Focus:
The research training course aims to address theoretical, methodological, technological and linguistic issues relevant for state-of-the-art terminology work, including multilingual perspectives, terminological variation, corpus-based term extraction and ontology-based domain recognition. There is a special focus on the consolidation and integration of existing terminological language resources. This is particularly relevant in light of coordinated efforts such as the EuroTermBank and CLARIN, but various other initiatives and projects will also be discussed.Research Training:
This PhD level course will be part of the thematic training programme offered by the Marie Curie ITN project CLARA. The course will consist of lectures, discussions, hands-on training activities and thesis/project work. The PhD students will be invited to present their projects for discussion with the invited speakers and other course participants.Participants:
The course is specifically aimed at early stage researchers pursuing a PhD degree, but is also open for candidates at master and postdoctoral levels. The course is relevant for researchers who are using language resources in their work and who need training in state-of-the-art tools in terminology and multilingual resources. We expect participants to have some knowledge about computational aspects, but the course does not require specific programming skills. Candidates who are affiliated with CLARA through one of its member institutions will be given priority, but we also welcome other national and international candidates.ECTS Credits:
Participation in the course will give 5 ECTS credits for candidates at PhD level who present their work, and a Diploma will be provided. Candidates not presenting will be given a Course Attendance Certificate.
Registration deadline (extended): 1 August 2010