Current Trends in Contrastive Linguistics

Current Trends in Contrastive Linguistics
Author: María de los Ángeles Gómez González
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2008-12-17
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027289689

This book examines the contribution of various recent developments in linguistics to contrastive analysis. The articles range across a broad gamut of languages, with most attention going to the languages of Europe. They show how advances in theory and computer technology are together impacting the field of contrastive linguistics. Part I focuses, from a broadly functional-cognitive viewpoint, on the close link with typology, stressing the importance of embedding the treatment of grammatical categories in their contexts of use. Part II turns to methodological issues, exploring the enormous potential offered by parallel, computer-accessible corpora to contrastive linguistics and to enhancing the testability, authenticity and empirical adequacy of cross-linguistic studies. Part III is concerned with contrastive semantics, ranging from individual items to entire grammatical constructions, and shows how meanings are coupled to language-specific cognitive strategies and even to cultural differences in subjective awareness and the fashioning of personal identity.

New Approaches to Contrastive Linguistics

New Approaches to Contrastive Linguistics
Author: Renata Enghels
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2020-07-20
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110682672

The practice of comparing languages has a long tradition characterized by a cyclic pattern of interest. Its meeting with corpus linguistics in the 1990s has led to a new sub-discipline of corpus-based contrastive studies. The present volume tackles two main challenges that had not yet been fully addressed in the literature, namely an empirical assessment of the nature of the data commonly used in cross-linguistic studies (e.g. translation data versus comparable data), and the development of advanced methods and statistical techniques suitably adapted to contrastive research settings. The papers collected in this volume endeavour to find out what (new) types of data are most useful for what kind of contrastive questions, and which advanced statistical techniques are most suited to deal with the multidimensionality of contrastive research questions. Answers to these questions are provided through the contrastive analysis of various language pairs or groups, and a wide variety of phenomena situated at almost all linguistic levels. In sum, this book provides an update on new methodological and theoretical insights in empirical contrastive linguistics and will stimulate further research within this field.

Corpus Studies in Contrastive Linguistics

Corpus Studies in Contrastive Linguistics
Author: Stefania Marzo
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2012
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027202621

Contrastive Linguistics, like other linguistic disciplines, is becoming more and more data-oriented, relying increasingly on the statistical analysis of corpus data to reveal and investigate the similarities and dissimilarities between languages. This title illustrates this trend with a representative sample of contrastive linguistic case studies.

Current Trends in Greek Linguistics

Current Trends in Greek Linguistics
Author: Georgia Fragaki
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2012-11-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1443842966

Current Trends in Greek Linguistics is a collection of fifteen papers written by junior researchers of Greek linguistics, aiming to highlight the ongoing linguistic research on Greek. The collected papers present original research from a fresh perspective, and bring to the fore aspects of the Greek language that have not been extensively examined so far. The authors provide a concise overview of their field and address problems in a variety of theoretical frameworks, including cognitive linguistics, formal linguistics, corpus linguistics, variational sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis. The volume comprises four sections: Aspects of Meaning, Textual and Sociolinguistic Approaches, Phonetics and Phonology, and Clinical Linguistics and Language Teaching. The first section includes chapters exploring lexical temporal expressions, the conceptualisation of time and the semantic properties of the subjunctive mood. The second section discusses issues relating to adjective evaluation, strategies of verbal humour, the role of social variables, media and political discourse. The section on phonetics and phonology includes three experimental studies that explore segmental and supra-segmental phenomena. The last section of the volume combines papers from two different fields, dealing with aphasic speech and the teaching of idioms. This collection of papers will appeal to researchers, students of linguistics and educators who are interested in Greek and/or the implications of its study for other languages and linguistic theory.

Lexis in Contrast

Lexis in Contrast
Author: Bengt Altenberg
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2002
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027222770

This work explores recent trends in cross-linguistic lexical studies. Topics include: lexis and contrastive linguistics; the revival of contrastive linguistics; multilingual corpora; theoretical and methodological issues; and types of cross-linguistic correspondence.

Pragmatic Markers and Pragmaticalization

Pragmatic Markers and Pragmaticalization
Author: Peter Lauwers
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2012
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 902720263X

In this paper, we investigate the evolution from imperatives to discourse markers in Romance, with a corpus-based approach. We focus on the case of items coming from verbs meaning 'to look', in a semasiological perspective: Spanish and Catalan mira, Portuguese olha, Italian guarda, French regarde, Romanian uite. We show that they all share many uses, among which turn-taking, introduction of reported speech, hesitation phenomenon, topic-shifting and modalization, except for French regarde. We then establish (against Waltereit, 2002) that the development of these uses is the result of a process

Linguistic Foundations of Narration in Spoken and Sign Languages

Linguistic Foundations of Narration in Spoken and Sign Languages
Author: Annika Hübl
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2018-05-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027263981

In recent years, the focus of linguistic research has shifted from sentence to larger units such as text and discourse and accordingly from syntax to semantics and pragmatics. This has led to the development and application of corresponding discourse semantic and pragmatic theories such as, for instance, (S)DRT, Centering Theory, Accessibility Theory, QUD, Generalized Conversational Implicatures, Super Monsters and Gesture Semantics and new empirical approaches in the framework of experimental semantics and pragmatics or corpus linguistic discourse analysis. The contributions to this collected volume build on these developments and investigate the linguistic foundations of narration from various perspectives. The contributions address topics such as speech and thought representation, free indirect speech, information structure, anaphora resolution, co-speech gestures, classifier constructions as well as role shift and constructed action. The volume provides new insights in the linguistic structures underlying narration in written, spoken, and sign languages from an experimental, developmental, historical, typological, and theoretical perspective. The contributions will appeal to theoretical linguists, sign language linguists, typologists, literary scholars, psycholinguists, and philosophers.

Semantic differences in translation

Semantic differences in translation
Author: Lore Vandevoorde
Publisher: Language Science Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2020
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3961100721

Although the notion of meaning has always been at the core of translation, the invariance of meaning has, partly due to practical constraints, rarely been challenged in Corpus-based Translation Studies. In answer to this, the aim of this book is to question the invariance of meaning in translated texts: if translation scholars agree on the fact that translated language is different from non-translated language with respect to a number of grammatical and lexical aspects, would it be possible to identify differences between translated and non-translated language on the semantic level too? More specifically, this books tries to formulate an answer to the following three questions: (i) how can semantic differences in translated vs non-translated language be investigated in a corpus-based study?, (ii) are there any differences on the semantic level between translated and non-translated language? and (iii) if there are differences on the semantic level, can we ascribe them to any of the (universal) tendencies of translation? In this book, I establish a way to visually explore semantic similarity on the basis of representations of translated and non-translated semantic fields. A technique for the comparison of semantic fields of translated and non-translated language called SMM++ (based on Helge Dyvik’s Semantic Mirrors method) is developed, yielding statistics-based visualizations of semantic fields. The SMM++ is presented via the case of inchoativity in Dutch (beginnen [to begin]). By comparing the visualizations of the semantic fields on different levels (translated Dutch with French as a source language, with English as a source language and non-translated Dutch) I further explore whether the differences between translated and non-translated fields of inchoativity in Dutch can be linked to any of the well-known universals of translation. The main results of this study are explained on the basis of two cognitively inspired frameworks: Halverson’s Gravitational Pull Hypothesis and Paradis’ neurolinguistic theory of bilingualism.

Cognitive-Functional Approaches to the Study of Japanese as a Second Language

Cognitive-Functional Approaches to the Study of Japanese as a Second Language
Author: Kaori Kabata
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2016-01-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1614515026

This innovative and original volume brings together studies that apply cognitive and functional linguistics to the study of the L2 acquisition of Japanese. With each article grounded on the usage-based model and/or conceptual notions such as foregrounding and subjectivity, the volume sheds light on how cognitive and functional linguistics can help us understand aspects of Japanese acquisition that have been neglected by traditionalists.