News
06 February 2011
- Book: Kaleidoscopic Grammar
- Conference: International Conference on Linguistic Cognition
- Conference: Text-Process-Text
- Symposium: Learning Language Models from Multilingual Corpora
- Book: Surviving Linguistics
- Book: Coherence and Cohesion in Spoken and Written Discourse
- Book: In the mood for mood
- Book: From now to eternity
- Review: An Introduction to Applied Linguistics, 2nd edition
- Course: Researching Multilingualism
- Workshop: Beyond Semantics: Corpus-Based Investigations
- Symposium: Symposium About Language and Society - Austin
- Book: Pragmatic Perspectives on Language and Linguistics
- Book: Perspectives on Discourse Analysis
- Book: Framing
Book: Kaleidoscopic Grammar
This monograph deals with binary features in the evolution of human civilisation and cognition, with a particular focus on language. Our life is surrounded by various pairs of binary features, and this is termed
binarism in this work. Binarism is pervasive, ranging from nature (biological) to culture (anthropological and archaeological) and, without a doubt, to language. Binarim serves as a good base for further development, and as a system becomes more complex, binarism is broken and more complex systems involving third or fourth options emerge. In the case of language, the earliest human language, as argued here, consisted only of nouns; however, these nouns had a distinction between active and inactive nouns.
The active nouns referred to action or productivity, which later turned into verbs and inactive nouns stayed as nouns. It was during this period that language became equipped with a base to develop further with a distinction between noun and verb. This is the onset of various changes towards the complexity of modern languages, essentially, kaleidoscopic grammar. Various changes in language stem from binarism, and as languages evolve, the pairs such as noun v. verb are broken and a grammatical system in general becomes more complex. The importance of binarism is not restricted to language and it is a powerful tool in evolution at different levels. The pervasiveness of binarism is a specific feature that should not be overlooked in evolution as a whole.
Author: Junichi ToyotaConference: International Conference on Linguistic Cognition
Date: 15 to 17 September 2011
Location: Tambov, Russia
Contact Person: Luidmila FursCall Deadline: 01 March 2011
Problems to be discussed:
1. Theoretical problems in studying linguistic cognition.
2. Methodological problems in studying thinking: culture, action and cognition.
3. Modelling how verbal and cultural resources influence discourse, verbal activity semiotics and the brain.
4. Representation, conceptualization, categories and action.
5. The impact of technologies on language and conceptualization.
6. Cognition and communication: The body and culture.
7. Historical and cognitive aspects of dialogical events.
8. What Russian views of psychology and cognitive linguistics have to offer in the context of contemporary Western work.Conference: Text-Process-Text
Date: 17 to 19 November 2011
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
Contact: Elisabet TiseliusCall Deadline: 31 March 2011
Questions in Process Oriented Research on Translation and Interpreting
Process oriented research on translation and interpreting has developed strongly during the last decades, partly thanks to the availability of new research methods, including new methods for on-line data collection. Important advances have been made using e.g. introspective methods, key- logging of the writing process, and eye-tracking. Questions addressed have included problems and strategies, working memory constraints in the process, monitoring, revising and self-repairs, but also aspects such as the use of tools in the process, the role of creativity, and the processing of particular textual aspects.
This conference has a strong focus on both texts and processes and explores the possibilities for studying both aspects in combination.
We particularly welcome presentations addressing issues like:
-Possibilities and limits of inferring processes from texts
-Possibilities and limits in using process data to explain and predict textual characteristics
-Triangulation of different methods, for studying both text and process.Symposium: Learning Language Models from Multilingual Corpora
Date: 06 April 2011
Location: York, United Kingdom
Contact: Preslav NakovCall Deadline: 06 April 2011
International organizations, such as the UN and the EU, news agencies, and companies operating internationally are producing large volumes of texts indifferent languages. As a result, large publicly-available parallel paragraph-or sentence-aligned corpora have been created for many language pairs, e.g., French-English, Chinese-English or Arabic-English. The multilingual nature of the EU has given rise to many documents available in all or many of its official languages, which have been assembled in multi-lingual parallel corpora such as Europarl (11 languages, 34-55M words for each) and JRC-Acquis (22 languages, 11-22M words for each).
These parallel corpora have been used, both monolingually and multilingually, for a variety of NLP tasks, including but not limited to machine translation, cross-lingual information retrieval, word sense disambiguation, semantic relation extraction, named entity recognition, POS tagging, and syntactic parsing. With the advent of Internet, there has been also an explosion in the availability of semi-parallel multilingual online resources like Wikipedia that have been used for similar tasks and have a big potential for future exploration and research.Book: Surviving Linguistics
Cascadilla Press is delighted to announce the second edition of Surviving Linguistics by Monica Macaulay. Surviving Linguistics is a valuable resource for students at any stage of their graduate career, from learning to write linguistics papers through completing their dissertation and finding a job. Along the way, the author explains the process of submitting conference abstracts, speaking at conferences, publishing journal articles, writing grant applications, creating a CV, and much more. Throughout Surviving Linguistics, Macaulay emphasizes the importance of working with advisors, dissertation committees, and fellow graduate students.
The second edition includes new exercises as well as helpful references to many new books and online resources. This fully updated edition contains new advice about PowerPoint presentations, conference poster sessions, citations and citation managers, funding sources, and applying for grants.
There are revised and expanded sections on informed consent and human subjects, preparing to submit a journal article, and job options for linguists. Undergraduates will find guidance on preparing for grad school in linguistics, with advice on choosing, applying to, and visiting graduate programs.
Author: Monica MacaulayBook: Coherence and Cohesion in Spoken and Written Discourse
Coherence and Cohesion in Spoken and Written Discourse provides new insights into the various ways coherence works in a wide spread of spoken and written text types and interactional situations, all of which point to the dynamics and subjectivity of its nature. Despite the variety of approaches the authors adopt, they share an understanding of language as a dynamic and heterogeneous system mediating interaction in social and cultural contexts and explain how coherence and cohesion are reflected in
different contextually bound aspects of human communication.
The chapters of the book comprise essays by linguists working in the fields of pragmatics, discourse analysis and stylistics which explore features contributing to the perception of cohesion and coherence in spoken and written varieties of English, namely impromptu, academic and political discourse within the former variety, and media, academic and fictional discourse within the latter.
This volume, which combines theoretical insights with practical analyses of different varieties of spoken and written English discourse, will be of interest to a wide range of researchers, scholars and students of English.
Editors: Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova, and Renata PovolnáBook: In the mood for mood
This volume is a selection of papers presented at the 7th Chronos colloquium in Antwerp (2006), which deal with the expression of modality (in a wide sense), by modal and semi-modal verbs (in Germanic and Romance languages), on the one hand, and by other markers (in languages like Turkish, Tibetan and Japanese), on the other. The Antwerp edition's special conference topic was the interaction between tense and modality, of which some of the papers collected in this volume also testify. The volume covers
a wide range of languages and topics. Specific topics include: the distinction between root and epistemic modality and its interaction with tense and counterfactuality; epistemic deve and dovrebbe in Italian;
semi-modals in German; the interpretation of epistemic past modals in English and Spanish; the interface between Turkish 'almost' adverbs and the Turkish verbal system; the meaning of epistemic endings in Spoken Standard Tibetan; Korean 'evidential' markers teiru and ta and so-called fake past sentences in Japanese.
Editors: Tanja Mortelmans, Jesse Mortelmans, and Walter De MulderBook: From now to eternity
The present volume contains a selection of papers presented at the 7th Chronos colloquium in Antwerp (2006). They specifically focus on issues dealing with the categories of Aktionsart, aspect and tense, and the possible relations between these categories, mainly in Germanic and Romance languages. Some of the papers in this collection put the relation between tense and modal meaning into focus, which was in fact the Antwerp conference's special topic. More in particular, the papers in this volume deal with: non-state imperfectives in Romance and West-Germanic; aspectual properties of French locative constructions; a new typology of accomplishments and achievements; the compatibility of (im)perfective aspect with negation; temporal properties of gerundive adjunct clauses in Portuguese; the Present Perfective Puzzle; the multiple meanings of the present perfect in the Germanic languages; modal uses of present and
non-present tenses in Dutch and French; the impossibility to use 'perfective' viewpoint tenses in conditional protases.
Editors: Jesse Mortelmans, Tanja Mortelmans, and Walter De MulderReview: An Introduction to Applied Linguistics, 2nd edition
As the title indicates, this book aims to provide the reader with an introductory overview of the field of Applied Linguistics (AL). At the same time, the editor makes it clear that it is his intention not only to introduce a series of topics within the field of AL but also to provide the reader with enough material, at a sophisticated enough level, to permit immediate, further, more advanced reading and research in each of the areas covered.
The volume contains sixteen chapters. After an introductory chapter, the book is divided into three macro sections (more on this below), each of which is further divided into four or five chapters, for a total of fourteen subject area chapters. Each of these chapters, independently authored by specialists, follows
the same basic format: introduction, an explanation of the key issues, the pedagogical implications of the topic, a brief further reading list and at least one hands-on activity. Since this format is unvarying, it is not described again in each chapter but is commented upon in the Evaluation section below. The sixteenth and final chapter features suggested solutions to the hands-on activities of the other chapters.
Overall, this book is a very good introductory text for AL, in particular for any reader involved in English language education. The decision to feature co-authors for most of the chapters offers a greater guarantee of authoritativeness and breadth of treatment, and, despite the introductory nature of the volume, the authors are mostly well-known specialists in their fields. This allows the editor to stay true to his promise of providing a 'sophisticated introduction' to those areas of AL treated in this volume, and provides the reader with a satisfying sense of having engaged with authentic AL material and thus being prepared to delve into further research.
Editor: Norbert SchmittPublisher: Oxford University Press; Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
Course: Researching Multilingualism
Date: 04 to 08 April 2011
Location: University of Birmingham, United Kingdom
Contact: Marilyn Martin-JonesThis is a 5-day residential course on Researching multilingualism: key concepts, issues and methods which will be held at the MOSAIC Centre for Research on Multilingualism, School of Education, University of Birmingham, UK.It is being organised as part of a 3 year project of research training for Ph.D. students and post-doctoral researchers in the field of multilingualism. The project is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of its Researcher Development Initiative. The organisers of this 5 day course are: Professor Marilyn Martin-Jones and Dr Deirdre Martin, MOSAIC Centre for Research on Multilingualism. See the MOSAIC website for details of other activities organised as part of the 3 year project: May 2010-2013.
The 5-day course will be organised into sessions, with different themes and orienting theories. The sessions will be led by different members of the MOSAIC Centre for Research on Multilingualism and by guest lecturers.
Session 1: Researching multilingualism: why, what and how?
Session 2: Discourses about multilingualism
Session 3: From policy to communicative practice in multilingual schools and classrooms
Session 4: Bilingual practitioners in monolingual institutional contexts
Session 5: Creating multilingual spaces: complementary schools and local life worlds
Session 6: From language policy to bilingual education practice
Session 7: Literacy practices in bilingual and multilingual educational contexts
Session 8: Multilingual literacy practices in local life worlds (including the internet)
Session 9: Multilingualism in research practiceWorkshop: Beyond Semantics: Corpus-Based Investigations
Date: 23 to 25 February 2011
Location: Goettingen, Germany
Contact: Stefanie DipperWorkshop: 'Beyond semantics: Corpus-based investigations of pragmatic and discourse phenomena'
Organizers: Stefanie Dipper (Bochum) and Heike Zinsmeister (Konstanz) Workshop organized as part of the Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS).
Symposium: Symposium About Language and Society - Austin
Date: 15 to 17 April 2011
Location: Austin, Texas, USA
Contact: John Ryan SullivantThe Symposium about Language and Society-Austin (SALSA) is pleased to announce its 19th Annual meeting, to be held April 15-17 at the University of Texas at Austin. The theme of this year's conference is 'Language in the Public Domain.'
Book: Pragmatic Perspectives on Language and Linguistics
Speech Actions in Theory and Applied Studies, the first of the two volumes of Pragmatic Perspectives on Language and Linguistics, brings together twenty essays which critically examine linguistic action and explore ways in which it can be accounted for. The articles presented in this collection are all focused on "doing things with words", but in most cases do not subscribe to speech act theory in the tradition of John L. Austin and John R. Searle. The linking thread through the volume is not a theoretical commitment to one of the speech-act theoretical models, but the authors' perspective on language as a means of action, how linguistic expressions become effective in context and how this effectiveness can be explicated.
The papers represent different pragmatic approaches and varied levels of expertise in the research area; among the authors there are eminent linguists and philosophers, well established researchers, and young
beginners. The texts include purely theoretical discussions, case studies, reports on research in experimental pragmatics, contrastive and corpus studies, and considerations of the pedagogical implications of pragmatic reflection on the nature of language. Without purporting to cover all
relevant topics, this variety reflects the complex character of linguistic pragmatics and integrates studies which cross-cut other research fields.
The book is divided in three parts. This collection is supplemented by the essays gathered in volume two, entitled Pragmatics of Semantically Restricted Domains.
Editor: Iwona Witczak-PlisieckaBook: Perspectives on Discourse Analysis
"Perspectives on Discourse Analysis: Theory and Practice" provides the student/reader with the basic theoretical knowledge and the empirical tools of some of the most relevant approaches to the analysis of discourse. It has been mainly conceived of as a general (university) course on Discourse Analysis, but it can also be useful for any person or group whose main concern is to acquire the basic necessary knowledge and skills for analyzing any type of discourse. The subject matter of the book could not
only be of use for linguists or prospective linguists: given its interdisciplinary character, its findings can be (and in fact are) used and applied by practitioners and scholars from different fields, such as sociology, psychology, medical science, computer science, and so on. Thus the book can be used by any person who, having certain linguistic knowledge, is interested in exploring the fascinating world of discourse.
All the chapters contain both a theoretical and an empirical section, the latter containing examples of analysis, as well as exercises (Practice) and self-evaluation questions, whose answers can be found at the end of the book (in the Practice key and Key to self-evaluation questions sections).
The book is divided into 12 chapters. The first two introduce basic information about discourse analysis and text linguistics, as well as the necessary techniques for gathering data, including a very brief
introduction to corpus linguistics. Chapters 3-11 present and discuss some of the most prominent and well-known approaches to discourse analysis, namely Pragmatics, Interactional Sociolinguistics, Conversation Analysis, The Ethnography of Communication, Variation Analysis and Narrative
Analysis, Functional Sentence Perspective, Post-Structuralist Theory and Social Theory, Critical Discourse Analysis and Positive Discourse Analysis, and Mediated Discourse Analysis. Finally, Chapter 12 deals with crucial and further issues, such as the type of discourse chosen for the analysis, the strategies and functions of discourse, or the problem of choosing an appropriate unit of analysis which will suit the aims of research. "Perspectives on Discourse Analysis: Theory and Practice" may prove of value to all those who are professionally involved in the area of discourse and pragmatic studies, or simply to those who wish to acquire the necessary basic knowledge and techniques for analyzing any type of discourse, from
medical, journalistic or political discourse to computer-mediated, humoristic, or hegemonic discourse (where the use and abuse of power is an important issue), just to name a few of the innumerable possibilities A desirable and intended effect of this book is also the development of an open and tolerant mind, which will eventually lead to a better understanding of the different and varied manifestations of language, culture and communication in human society.
Author: Laura Alba JuezBook: Framing
The aim of this issue is to provide an overview of current research into frame semantics and construction grammar, and to stimulate the dialogue between these frameworks and the notion of framing in other linguistic traditions. Using Fillmore's frame semantics as a common source of inspiration, the volume examines a spectrum of semantic issues, from a theoretical and more applied perspective. Among the topics that are addressed are the relation between frames and other (cognitive) grammatical models, ontologies and discourse analysis, as well as the methodological difference between top-down and bottom-up approaches. The eight articles on grammatical, lexical and discursive forms cover issues as diverse as political discourse in Belgium, France and the USA, Czech function words, English communication verbs, modality and the relation between instrumentals and causality in LSP. Researchers from theoretical and applied linguistics interested in the form/meaning interface and authentic discourse data may appreciate this work as a valuable resource for further reflection on the relation between grammar and the lexicon, frames and ontology.
Editors: Paul Sambre and Cornelia Wermuth