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This monograph is intended as a reference book on Detachment Constructions (DECs) in the Information Structuring of oral and spoken languages. Focusing on DECs in a textual perspective, the book is an innovative contribution to the knowledge of oral and spoken languages, some of them widespread (Indo-European), others less taught (Finno-Ugric).
This book explores the use of online and face-to-face interactions in language teacher education (LTE) by assessing the formation and practices of a community of practice (CoP), and evaluating the roles discussions between student teachers and a peer tutor can play in terms of identity formation, articulating narratives, reflective practices, and maintaining affective relationships. The specific context within which this is embedded is a Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) programme, often known as English Language Teaching (ELT), at a third-level Irish institution. The data drawn on come from student teachers on a master’s (MA) programme who interacted with a peer tutor (the researcher) via a number of modes (face-to-face and online). The approach to data analysis is a corpus-based discourse analytical one, which examines the linguistic features of student teacher and peer tutor talk; the features of CoP practices in the discourse; and how different modes of communication shape the nature of this discourse. Perceptive data from the student teachers is used to outline their reactions to the modes of communication and the activities they participated in.
Writing centers in universities and colleges aim to help student writers develop practices that will make them better writers in the long term and that will improve their draft papers in the short term. The tutors who work in writing centers accomplish such goals through one-to-one talk about writing. This book analyzes the aboutness of writing center talk—what tutors and student writers talk about when they come together to talk about writing. By combining corpus-driven analysis to provide a quantitative, microlevel view of the subject matter and sociocultural discourse analysis to provide a qualitative macrolevel view of tutor-student writer interactions, it further establishes how these two research methods operate together to produce a robust and rigorous analysis of spoken discourse.
Languages are inseparable from their contexts of use. They are not only congruent with, but also involved in the configuration of the worldviews and value systems manifested in cultures and embodied in texts. The spread of English worldwide foregrounds the issue of textual dynamics in intercultural settings. The production/reception of texts in English facilitates international contacts and exchanges, yet it also triggers hegemonic practices. The volume aims to investigate the representations and negotiations of sociocognitive identities in intercultural settings relevant for 'good practice'. Contributions explore 'languaging' strategies (verbal, visual, multimodal; English monolingual, bilingual, multilingual) through a range of methodological perspectives wherein the respect for sociocultural differences is a constitutive value.
This book examines the expanding world of genres on the Internet to understand issues of science communication today. The book explores how some traditional print genres have become digital, how some genres have evolved into new digital hybrids, and how and why new genres have emerged and are emerging in response to new rhetorical exigences and communicative demands. Because social actions are in constant change and, ensuing from this, genres evolve faster than ever, it is important to gain insight into the interrelations between old genres and new genres and the processes underpinning the construction of new genre sets, chains and assemblages for communicating scientific research to both expert and diversified audiences. In examining scientific genres on the Internet this book seeks to illustrate the increasing diversification of genre ecologies and their underlying social, disciplinary and individual agendas.
Mood, modality and evidentiality are popular and dynamic areas in linguistics. Re-Assessing Modalising Expressions – Categories, co-text, and context focuses on the specific issue of the ways language users express permission, obligation, volition (intention), possibility and ability, necessity and prediction linguistically. Using a range of evidence and corpus data collected from different sources, the authors of this volume examine the distribution and functions of a range of patterns involving modalising expressions as predominantly found in standard American English, British English or Hong Kong English, but also in Japanese. The authors are particularly interested in addressing (co-)textual manifestations of modalising expressions as well as their distribution across different text-types and thus filling a gap research was unable to plug in the past. Thoughts on categorising or re-categorising modalising expressions initiate and complement a multi-perspectival enterprise that is intended to bring research in this area a step forward.
This volume surveys the phenomenon of syntactic complexity in a diversity of languages and from a diversity of theoretical perspectives. The topics include clause combining strategies such as relative, complement, and adverbial clauses, serialization, clausal nominalizations, but also the switch reference systems involved in clause chains, the role of insubordination and the influence of language contact in the development of syntactic complexity as well as the acquisition of complex clauses in child language and the grammaticalization processes leading to syntactic complexity. These studies illustrate the varied aspects involved in clause combining and help to understand how syntactic complexity works and evolves in the world’s languages, how it varies across languages, how it is influenced by language contact, how it is acquired. As such, this book gives the opportunity for readers to expand both their typological and their theoretical knowledge about syntactic complexity in a variety of languages.
Argument-marking, morphological partitives have been the topic of language specific studies, while no cross-linguistic or typological analyses have been conducted. Since individual partitives of different languages have been studied, there exists a basis for a more cross-linguistic approach. The purpose of this book is to fill the gap and to bring together research on partitives in different languages.
In this tribute to Knud Lambrecht, a pioneer of Information Structure, a diverse group of scholars examines the intersection of syntax, discourse, pragmatics, and semantics. The six chapters in the first section of the volume consider issues of grammar with new theoretical and applied insights, pertaining to grammatical constructions such as left dislocation, unaccusatives, null complements, and passives. While the first half of the book presents studies involving a range of languages from Russian to Irish to Italian, the second section is dedicated to papers focused on French. These five chapters feature the application of Construction Grammar and/or Information Structure frameworks to prosody and second language processing, as well as to several distinctive spoken French constructions: clefts, left dislocations, and interrogatives. Collectively, this book offers substantial reading for those interested in the juncture of structure and context, notably a critical take on the important legacy of a preeminent linguist.
The Handbook of Second and Foreign Language Writing is an authoritative reference compendium of the theory and research on second and foreign language writing that can be of value to researchers, professionals, and graduate students. It is intended both as a retrospective critical reflection that can situate research on L2 writing in its historical context and provide a state of the art view of past achievements, and as a prospective critical analysis of what lies ahead in terms of theory, research, and applications. Accordingly, the Handbook aims to provide (i) foundational information on the emergence and subsequent evolution of the field, (ii) state-of-the-art surveys of available theoretical and research (basic and applied) insights, (iii) overviews of research methods in L2 writing research, (iv) critical reflections on future developments, and (iv) explorations of existing and emerging disciplinary interfaces with other fields of inquiry.