Mouton Textbook
This book teaches the basics of the structure of the English language with plentiful extracts from novels, poems and plays, so that literature students learn how to identify parts of speech and discuss their effects. No previous linguistics experience is assumed. Each chapter is divided into a definition of a specific linguistic feature; a demonstration of it in a literary text; a literary exercise where readers identify it themselves and assess its effect; and a brief summary of the teaching point. Interpretation is subjective and readers will learn how to build linguistic evidence to support their view. Essential knowledge for anyone who analyses English Literature.
This textbook provides the first foundational introduction to the practice of analysing multimodality, covering the full breadth of media and situations in which multimodality needs to be a concern. Readers learn via use cases how to approach any multimodal situation and to derive their own specifically tailored sets of methods for conducting and evaluating analyses. Extensive references and critical discussion of existing approaches from many disciplines and in each of the multimodal domains addressed are provided. The authors adopt a problem-oriented perspective throughout, showing how an appropriate foundation for understanding multimodality as a phenomenon can be used to derive strong methodological guidance for analysis as well as supporting the adoption and combination of appropriate theoretical tools. Theoretical positions found in the literature are consequently always related back to the purposes of analysis rather than being promoted as valuable in their own right. By these means the book establishes the necessary theoretical foundations to engage productively with today’s increasingly complex combinations of multimodal artefacts and performances of all kinds.
Why does language change? Why can we speak to and understand our parents but have trouble reading Shakespeare? Why is Chaucer's English of the fourteenth century so different from Modern English of the late twentieth century that the two are essentially different languages? Why are Americans and English 'one people divided by a common language'? And how can the language of Chaucer and Modern English - or Modern British and American English - still be called the same language? The present book provides answers to questions like these in a straightforward way, aimed at the non-specialist, with ample illustrations from both familiar and more exotic languages.
Most chapters in this new edition have been reworked, with some difficult passages removed, other passages thoroughly rewritten, and several new sections added, e.g. on the regularity of sound change and its importance for general historical-comparative linguistics. Further, the chapter notes and bibliography have all been updated.
The content is engaging, focusing on topics and issues that spark student interest. Its goals are broadly pedagogical and the level and presentation are appropriate for interested beginners with little or no background in linguistics. The language coverage for examples goes well beyond what is usual for books of this kind, with a considerable amount of data from various languages of India.
English Pronunciation for Speakers of Spanish fills a gaping hole in the market for books on English phonetics and pronunciation because it not only combines theoretical issues and applications to practice, but it also adopts a contrastive English-Spanish approach to better suit the needs of Spanish-speaking learners of English (SSLE), enabling them to build gradually on the knowledge gained in each chapter.
The book covers the key concepts of English phonetics and phonology in seven chapters written in an accessible and engaging style:
1. Phonetics and Phonology
2. The Production and Classification of Speech Sounds
3. Vowels and Glides
4. Consonants
5. Segment Dynamics: Aspects of Connected Speech
6. Beyond the Segment: Stress and Intonation
7. Predicting Pronunciation from Spelling (and vice versa)
Features:
- in-text audio illustrations, as well as over a hundred written and audio exercises with corresponding keys and different kinds of artwork (Tables, Figures, illustrations, spectrograms, etc.)
- classic readings in the discipline in the Further Reading section of each chapter
- highlights the phonetic contrasts and specific cues that are more important to aid comprehension in English and offers guidelines on "correct" pronunciation habits to help SSLE sound as close as possible to native English
The book's companion website, EPSS Multimedia Lab, can be used on computers, smartphones and tablets, and is useful for the self-taught student and the busy lecturer alike.
The website of the EPSS Multimedia lab can be accessed here: http://www.usc.gal/multimlab/
Features of the website:
- a complete sound bank defining and illustrating the sounds of English RP as compared with those of Peninsular Spanish
- written definitions and animated diagrams, videos and original recordings (by native speakers of English and Spanish) showing the articulation of each sound, alongside its most common spellings, as well as pronunciation practice for individual words and whole sentences
- a comprehensive selection of over a hundred written and audio exercises (with their keys) for practice both at home or in the language lab
- audio files corresponding to the audio illustrations given in the written book
- a repository of useful resources by topics and a list of online glossaries and pronunciation dictionaries
The new and updated third edition of this highly successful textbook contains an additional chapter that presents modern empirical research methods in the form of exemplary small-scale studies. In these projects the authors invite the reader to develop and address research questions from phonetics/phonology, morphology and syntax. The pertinent experimental and corpus-linguistic techniques are introduced and students are familiarized with some basic statistical tools necessary for the analysis of the data.
The major difference between this book and its potential competitors lies in its hands-on didactic orientation, with a strong focus on linguistic analysis and argumentation. Language and linguistic theory are approached from a strictly empirical perspective: given a certain set of data to be accounted for, theoretical and methodological problems must be solved in order to analyze and understand the data properly. The book is not written from the perspective of a particular theoretical framework and draws on insights from various research traditions. Introduction to English Linguistics concentrates on gaining expertise and analytical skills in the traditional core areas of linguistics, i.e. phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. The chapter on "Extensions and applications" widens the perspective to other areas of linguistic research, such as historical, socio- and psycholinguistics. Each chapter is accompanied by exercises and suggestions for further reading. A glossary and an index facilitate access to terms and topics.
This book will introduce the field of forensic semiotics as a tool for understanding crime and criminality. It will focus on how symbolism, ritual, and other sign-based activities play a crucial role in the constitution of criminal organizations and often in the enactment of individual crimes. It will present semiotic notions, methods, and techniques that can be applied to forensic science, such as the role of ritual and slang in criminal gangs.
This is an updated edition of Good Humor, Bad Taste: A Sociology of the Joke, published in 2006. Using a combination of interview materials, survey data, and historical materials, it explores the relationship between humor and gender, age, social class, and national differences in the Netherlands and the United States. This edition includes new developments and research findings in the field of humor studies.
This book offers an introduction to the derivation of meaning that is accessible and worked out to facilite an understanding of key issues in compositional semantics. The syntactic background offered is generative, the major semantic tool used is set theory. These tools are applied step-by-step to develop essential interface topics and a selection of prominent contrastive topics with material from English and German.
This book deals with syntax in three dimensions: in part I with the history of grammatical theory, in part II with synchronic aspects of Present-Day English, and in part III with diachronic aspects of English. The most prominent linguistic terms and phenomena are discussed in their historical context and are taken up again in the synchronic and diachronic parts. In this way they can be viewed from different perspectives.
At the end of each chapter a summary and recommendations for further reading is provided as well as exercises in parts II and III. There is also a webpage for this book with more material, a glossary, and model answers of the exercises. The aims of the book are 1) to provide an introduction to the history of grammatical theory in order to show how and why generative grammar evolved (alongside other theories); in this way, generative grammar is presented in its historical context, and the motivation for the ideas and assumptions of this theory becomes clear; 2) to show that the terms and phenomena discussed are still applicable and interesting today; 3) to investigate phenomena of Present-Day English and their development in the history of English by means of authentic data, and to find explanations for the developmental paths they took by applying theory.
This book primarily aims at undergraduate students of English or linguistics who have already acquired some knowledge of syntax and generative syntactic theory. It is also well suited for students specialising in syntax, syntactic theory, and language change. It can further be used as a study aid for final exams.
This textbook invites you on a trip around the globe, uncovering layer by layer the complex, yet intriguing facets of English spoken world-wide. The busy streets of London, the scorched vistas of Australia, the colourful and noisy landscapes of New Delhi – English can be heard everywhere. But what are the specific features of these Englishes? What cultural and sociolinguistic realities underlie their use? This textbook brings this exciting and ever-changing world of Englishes right to your door!
Essentials of Mastering English: A Concise Grammar is both an ideal companion for undergraduate students wishing to acquire a high level of grammatical proficiency and a readily accessible reference work for teachers of English at all levels. It provides an introduction to basic grammatical terms and to elementary syntactic description, enabling students to analyse sentences and utterances down to word level with a specification of both the form and the function of all constituents.
This textbook helps undergraduate students of language and linguistics taking their first steps in one of the core areas of grammar, introducing them to the basic ideas, insights, and techniques of contemporary semantic theory. Requiring no special background knowledge, the book starts with everyday observations about word meaning and use and then hightlights the role of structure in the analysis of the meanings of phrases and clauses, zooming in on the fascinating and vexing question of how speakers manage to meaningfully communicate with sentences and texts they have never come across before. At the same time, the reader becomes acquainted with the modern, functionalist characterization of linguistic meaning in terms of reference (extension) and information (intension), and learns to apply technical tools from formal logic to analyzing the meaning of complex linguistic expressions as being composed by the meanings of their parts. Each of the nine main chapters contains a variety of exercises for self-study and classroom use, with model solutions in the appendix. Extensive English examples provide ample illustration.
This book is the revised and extended second edition of Statistics for Linguistics with R. The volume is an introduction to statistics for linguists using the open source software R. It is aimed at students and instructors/professors with little or no statistical background and is written in a non-technical and reader-friendly/accessible style.
It first introduces in detail the overall logic underlying quantitative studies: exploration, hypothesis formulation and operationalization, and the notion and meaning of significance tests. It then introduces some basics of the software R relevant to statistical data analysis. A chapter on descriptive statistics explains how summary statistics for frequencies, averages, and correlations are generated with R and how they are graphically represented best. A chapter on analytical statistics explains how statistical tests are performed in R on the basis of many different linguistic case studies: For nearly every single example, it is explained what the structure of the test looks like, how hypotheses are formulated, explored, and tested for statistical significance, how the results are graphically represented, and how one would summarize them in a paper/article. A chapter on selected multifactorial methods introduces how more complex research designs can be studied: methods for the study of multifactorial frequency data, correlations, tests for means, and binary response data are discussed and exemplified step-by-step. Also, the exploratory approach of hierarchical cluster analysis is illustrated in detail.
The book comes with many exercises, boxes with short think breaks and warnings, recommendations for further study, and answer keys as well as a statistics for linguists newsgroup on the companion website.
Just like the first edition, it is aimed at students, faculty, and researchers with little or no statistical background in statistics or the open source programming language R. It avoids mathematical jargon and discusses the logic and structure of quantitative studies and introduces descriptive statistics as well as a range of monofactorial statistical tests for frequencies, distributions, means, dispersions, and correlations. The comprehensive revision includes new small sections on programming topics that facilitate statistical analysis, the addition of a variety of statistical functions readers can apply to their own data, a revision of overview sections on statistical tests and regression modeling, a complete rewrite of the chapter on multifactorial approaches, which now contains sections on linear regression, binary and ordinal logistic regression, multinomial and Poisson regression, and repeated-measures ANOVA, and a new visual tool to identify the right statistical test for a given problem and data set. The amount of code available from the companion website has doubled in size, providing much supplementary material on statistical tests and advanced plotting.
This successful textbook introduces beginning university students of English to the study of English linguistics. Now updated and expanded, the second edition features a more detailed discussion of the differences between British and North American English, and explains the differences in the two traditions of phonetic transcription.
The major difference between this book and its potential competitors lies in its hands-on didactic orientation, with a strong focus on linguistic analysis and argumentation. Language and linguistic theory are approached from a strictly empirical perspective: given a certain set of data to be accounted for, theoretical and methodological problems must be solved in order to analyze and understand the data properly. The book is not written in the perspective of a particular theoretical framework and draws on insights from various research traditions. Introduction to English Linguistics concentrates on gaining expertise and analytical skills in the traditional core areas of linguistics, i.e. phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. The final chapter on "Extensions and applications" widens the perspective to other areas of linguistic research, such as historical, socio- and psycholinguistics. Each chapter is accompanied by exercises and suggestions for further reading. A glossary and an index facilitate access to terms and topics.
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.
The book can be used both from the first semester onwards and as perfect study aid for final B.A.-examinations.
This textbook is an accessible introduction to both English phonology and phonology in general. It analyzes some central phenomena of the sound system of two standard varieties of English, Southern British English and General American. The framework adopted is Cognitive Linguistics and Construction Grammar, and this entails in particular that all the elements of the sound system are tightly interwoven with the meaningful units: morphemes, words, phrases and sentences. The book contains chapters on articulatory phonetics, sounds and meaning, alternation patterns, word stress and intonation. Each chapter ends with an invitation to analyze English and other languages with the tools of Cognitive Linguistics.
The book is designed for students as well as teachers of English and linguistics, and while the target readership should already have a background in linguistics, a beginner in phonology will find all the basic concepts clearly defined.
The second edition of this collection of 13 original papers contains an updated introductory section detailing the significance that the original articles published in 1992 have for the further development of research into linguistic politeness into the 21st century.
The original articles focus on the phenomenon of politeness in language. They present the most important problems in developing a theory of linguistic politeness, which must deal with the crucial differences between lay notions of politeness in different cultures and the term 'politeness' as a concept within a theory of linguistic politeness. The universal validity of the term itself is called into question, as are models such as those developed by Brown and Levinson, Lakoff, and Leech. New approaches are suggested.
In addition to this theoretical discussion, an empirical section presents a number of case studies and research projects in linguistic politeness. These show what has been achieved within current models and what still remains to be done, in particular with reference to cross-cultural studies in politeness and differences between a Western and a non-Western approach to the subject.
The publication of this second edition demonstrates that the significance of the collection is just as salient in the first decade of the new millennium as it was at the beginning of the 1990s.
Word Power: Phrasal Verbs and Compounds is a textbook for guided self-learning intended for post-intermediate and advanced learners of English. It contains some 1,100 phrasal compounds used with 17 particles/prepositions which combine with some 500 different verbs, nouns and adjectives. Numerous glosses allow the teacher to use it in very heterogeneous classes.
Thanks to cognitive linguistics the material is organized around each particle giving the students an astonishing insight into the networks of metaphorical meanings of each particle. Furthermore, the book implements the most important findings and techniques in the field of learning a foreign language. This textbook will be a valuable companion for teachers and students.
This book, which can be seen as both a research monograph and a text book, challenges the approaches to human interaction based on supposedly universal "maxims of conversation" and "principles of politeness", which fly in the face of reality as experienced by millions of people - refugees, immigrants, crosscultural families, and so on. By contrast to such approaches, which can be of no use in crosscultural communication and education, this book is both theoretical and practical: it shows that in different societies, norms of human interaction are different and reflect different cultural attitudes and values; and it offers a framework within which different cultural norms and different ways of speaking can be effectively explored, explained, and taught.
The book discusses data from a wide range of languages, including English, Italian, Russian, Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, and Walmatjari (an Australian Aboriginal language), and it shows that the meanings expressed in human interaction and the different "cultural scripts" prevailing in different speech communities can be described and compared in a way that is clear, simple, rigorous, and free of ethnocentric bias by using a "natural semantic metalanguage", based on empirically established universal human concepts. As the book shows, this metalanguage can be used as a basis for teaching successful cross-cultural communication and education, including the teaching of languages in a cultural context.
Folk knowledge of language has not engaged linguists very often in the history of that field. Introductory texts often disparage folkbelief in contrast to 'scientific truth'. In fact, language is a ubiquitous topic of discussion and general concern of the folk. They talk about grammar, pronunciation, first and second language learning, language disabilities, dialects, gender and language, and a host of other topics. This book approaches such beliefs as one of the most important aspects of ethnography. Surely what a people believe about their language is as important as any other key to an understanding of their culture.;