News
March 2010
Word in Process New
This dissertation deals with the relation between words and meanings. Word meanings are flexible. The same word may have different interpretations, dependent on the context in which it occurs. In this thesis, it is argued that a meaning is not a static property of a word but that it is the input to the process of the production of a word or it is the result of the process of interpretation.
Furthermore, it is argued that these are processes of optimization. The output of the process is the candidate that best satisfies a set of ranked constraints. It is assumed that a word is linked to a set of semantic features. In interpretation, the meaning of a word is determined based on this set of features and the particular context in which the word occurs. Two Optimality Theoretic constraints play a role in the process of
interpretation: STRENGTH and FIT. Furthermore, it is argued that the same constraints play a role in the acquisition of word meaning. However, the way the constraints interact gradually changes during this process. In the production of words, the speaker starts with an intention to express something. The candidate forms are compared with respect to how much of the meaning of the intention they convey. For speakers, however, not only the amount of overlapping features determines the optimal candidate. Markedness constraints cause the avoidance of complexity, sometimes at the expense of faithfulness to the input. In conclusion, this study offers a comprehensive view on the relation between form and meaning and an account for the flexibility of words in context.
Author: Lotte Hogeweg
Meaning and Dyslexia New
This study is on the relation between developmental dyslexia and language comprehension. It provides novel evidence that children with dyslexia experience difficulties in the comprehension of sentences containing ambiguous pronouns, imperfective sentences, and sentences containing a universal quantifier. This evidence is used to formulate an hypothesis about the cognitive impairment underlying dyslexia. The result is the verbal Working Memory Deficit Hypothesis, according to which dyslexia is associated with a deficit affecting the verbal component of the Working Memory system. The study capitalizes on insights from both formal linguistics and developmental psychology. It is thus of interest to psychologists as well as to formal linguists.
Author: Gaetano FiorinAnaphora and Distributivity New
This thesis investigates two issues. It studies the interpretations of sentences with plural arguments and it analyzes anaphoricity triggered by the presence of semantically plural nouns. Regarding the first point, it is standardly assumed that sentences with plural arguments can have many interpretations. This thesis discusses various psycholinguistic experiments, as well as two new questionnaire studies, which show in detail how the preferences among these interpretations depend on the type of noun phrase, including preferences that are commonly not acknowledged in the semantic literature. One goal of this thesis is to offer a semantic and pragmatic account which captures all the interpretations but can also explain why some are preferred over others. The explanation is used for studying the anaphoric expressions `same', `different', `others' and reciprocals. What these expressions share is their ability to be anaphoric sentence-internally if there is a semantically plural noun in the clause. However, the availability of this reading depends on the type of noun phrase used, in a similar way that preferences in the interpretations do. Based on these and other data, the thesis offers a novel formal semantic analysis of reciprocals and argues for a particular semantics of `same', `different' and `others'. It is shown what consequences the analysis has for our understanding of anaphoricity and plurality. This study is relevant for scholars working on binding, anaphora, and the semantics and pragmatics of pluralities. More generally, it is of interest to scholars in the field of semantics and pragmatics, as well as for linguists working on the syntax-semantics interface.
Author: Jakub Dotla?ilStrategic Language Learning New
This monograph reports on a longitudinal inquiry into mainland Chinese
undergraduates' language learning experiences in an English medium
university in a multilingual setting with a focus on their strategic language learning efforts. This book examines the issue as to what extent language learners' strategic learning efforts depend on their 'choice', if
'the element of choice' is the defining characteristic of language learners' strategic learning behaviour. The inquiry, using a qualitative and ethnographic research approach, reveals dynamic interaction between learners' agency and contextual conditions underlying the participants'
strategic learning process. Such understanding informs pedagogical efforts
to foster individual learners' capacity for strategic learning and their capacities in opening up and sustaining a social learning space for exercising their strategic learning capacity or utilizing their strategic learning knowledge.
Author: Xuesong Andy GaoMultilinguals are ...? New
Multilinguals are people who use several languages in their everyday life. Most people around the world are multilinguals, although awareness about multilinguals has only recently stepped into the limelight wherever several languages are used, from London and Amsterdam to New York and California. Being a fresh focus of attention, multilinguals arouse attitudes which are extremely diverse: some consider them gifted or unusually intelligent, while others fear that they lack competence in any one language. This can lead to conflicting advice about multilingual education, language policies, and multilingualism itself at home, in school, and in speech-language clinics. This is the first book which discusses, in lay terms, the reasons behind the beliefs and myths traditionally associated with multilinguals. It is written for the general public and is relevant for families, teachers, and anyone who ever wondered about multilingualism. The style is light, often witty, but founded on a thorough knowledge of solid academic research on this subject. The book is abundantly illustrated and includes many cartoons.
Author: Madalena Cruz-FerreiraResearch Methods in Linguistics New
Research Methods in Linguistics guides the reader through the key issues, principles, and contributions of core methods in linguistic research. It is an essential resource for researchers and research students looking for clear introductions to key concepts, accessible discussions of theory and practice through illustrative examples, and critical engagement with
current debates. Topics include: developing research questions; combining methods;
quantitative research designs (including questionnaires, chi-square tests and t-tests); corpus analysis; qualitative research methods (discourse analytic approaches, linguistic ethnography, interviews & focus groups, multimodal analysis, and narrative analysis).
Author: Lia LitosselitiLexicography at a Crossroads (Peter Lang) New
The volume contains 15 contributions resulting from a symposium held from May 19 to 21, 2008, at the Centre for Lexicography, University of Aarhus (Denmark), whose programme was ''to focus on the future theoretical course of lexicography''. The contributors, ''researchers from five continents'', present their research on various facets of lexicography such as: printed and (mostly) electronic dictionaries, monolingual and bilingual lexicography, social and structural aspects of dictionary making. According to the Introduction, the chapters of this volume can be divided into two groups: those dealing with ''general lexicographic issues'' and those dealing with ''specific dictionary projects'' ).
Editors: Henning Bergenholtz, Sandro Nielsen, Sven TarpSoftware - Computational Linguistics Laboratory New
The Computational Linguistics Laboratory (CLL) at Katanov State University of Khakasia is pleased to announce the release of new linguistic software:
- Y-Stemmer - a program that allows the user getting stems of words in the input text;
- Star-Tagger - a program that annotates input text with parts-of-speech tags;
- TF*IDF Ranker - a program that computes weights for terms in the input text;
- UNIS Summarizer - a system recognizes input text genre and uses summarization algorithms optimized for the given text genre.Language Ideologies and Media Discourse New
The book is tightly focused on the relationship between language ideologies and media discourse, together with the methods and techniques required for the analysis of that relationship. It also places emphasis on
television and new-media texts, incorporating and expanding upon recent theoretical insights into visual communication and multimodal discourse analysis. International in scope, this book will also be of interest to students from
a wide range of fields including linguistics (particularly sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology), modern languages, education, media studies, communication studies and cultural theory.
Editors: Sally Johnson and Tommaso M. MilaniMultilingualism - Transatlantic Perspectives New
Date: 19 to 24 July 2010
Location: Hamburg, Germany
Contact: Monika Schulz
The world in which we live is increasingly multilingual. The forces of globalization, migration, and mobility have created new linguistic realities in both European and North American countries. Multilingualism in today's modern societies requires new expertise, skills and leadership to understand and meet the challenges of linguistic and cultural diversity. This summer school will tackle multilingualism in an interdisciplinary fashion and examine the linguistic, pedagogical, sociological, political and cultural dimensions of multilingualism today. If you are interested in language in a crossdisciplinary fashion and in a global context - this summer school is what you are looking for.System - Paradigm presentation stimulus New
Paradigm is a new stimulus presentation system for building interactive, millisecond accurate experiments for linguistics research. With Paradigm, you can, Build experiments quickly and easily using Paradigm's intuitive drag and drop user-interface. Present images/sounds, rating scales, self-paced reading trials, rich text and movies. Present interactive experiments like identification and visual world tasks using Paradigm's built-in mouse selection. Optimize timing accuracy with adjustable experiment priority settings. Control your eye-tracker, EEG system or fMRI scanner using Paradigm's Parallel and Serial Port events.Use Paradigm's Python based scripting language to completely customize your experiment. Distribute 'stand-alone' experiments over the web or in your lab without buying additional run-time licenses.
Free online Frequency lists New
We have recently placed online free frequency lists that are based on the
400 million word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), which is
the only large, up-to-date, genre-balanced corpus of American English that is publicly available. The free lists contain the top 5000 lemmas in American English, along with part of speech and frequency.
16th Annual Conference of the International Association for World New
Date: 25 to 27 July 2010
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Contact: Suzanne K. Hilgendorf
The 16th Annual Conference of the International Association for World Englishes (IAWE 16) is being hosted by Simon Fraser University at the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue in Vancouver, Canada from July 25 to 27, 2010. The conference theme is the World Englishes Today: A Critical Reevaluation of Theory, Methodology, and Pedagogy in Global ContextsThe Syntax of Ellipsis New
"The Syntax of Ellipsis" investigates a number of elliptical constructions
found in Dutch dialects within the framework of the Minimalist Program. Using two case studies, Van Craenenbroeck argues that both the PF-deletion and the pro-theory of ellipsis are needed to account for the full range of elliptical phenomena attested in natural language. "The Syntax of Ellipsis" will be of interest to scholars of the left periphery, wh-movement, and Dutch dialects.
Author: Jeroen van Craenenbroeck
The Evolution of Morphology New
This book considers the evolution of the grammatical structure of words in the more general contexts of human evolution and the origins of language. The consensus in many fields is that language is well designed for its
purpose, and became so either through natural selection or by virtue of non-biological constraints on how language must be structured. Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy argues that in certain crucial respects language is
not optimally designed. This can be seen, he suggests, in the existence of not one but two kinds of grammatical organization - syntax and morphology - and in the morphological and morpho-phonological complexity which leads to
numerous departures from the one-form-one-meaning principle.
Author: Andrew D. Carstairs-McCarthy
TIRF announces its 2010 Doctoral Dissertation Grant New
The International Research Foundation for English Language Education (TIRF) announces its 2010 Doctoral Dissertation Grant (DDG) competition. The International Research Foundation for English Language Education was founded in 1999 as the TESOL International Research Foundation (TIRF), an international, non-profit organization. Its aim is to generate new knowledge and to collect and organize existing knowledge about the teaching and learning of English for the purposes of informing educational policy; improving classroom practices; and, ultimately, expanding educational, occupational, and social opportunities for individuals in a global society.Sociolinguistics and Corpus Linguistics New
This textbook introduces students to the ways in which techniques from corpus linguistics can be used to aid sociolinguistic research. Corpus
linguistics shares with variationist sociolinguistics a quantitative approach to the study of variation or differences between populations. It may also complement qualitative traditions of enquiry such as
interactional sociolinguistics.
Author: Paul Baker