Language material in grammars and dictionaries: Authentic or thematically related?

Language material in grammars and dictionaries: Authentic or thematically related?
Author: Sina Bröcker
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
Total Pages: 25
Release: 2007-04-16
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 3638685861

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2+, University of Rostock (Institut für Sprachwissenschaft), course: Hauptseminar: Corpus dictionaries and lexical structure, language: English, abstract: The first dictionary was published in 1984. At that time the focus lay on lexicography especially on English as an international language. Nowadays nearly every three month new dictionaries appear. They are mainly published from publishing houses in Great Britain. This is due to the dominance which British lexicography won in the 1960s. When the first Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English appeared in 1978 British lexicography had finally won dominance to American lexicography. In 1987 the second edition of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English and the Collins COBUILD Dictionary of the English language appeared. These works were completely different to the ones before. According to Sidney I. Landau these works were “in many respects a daring departure from the customary practices of lexicography, and particularly of ESL lexicography” . They offered a new look at what the user needed. The aim of this paper is to take a closer look on these dictionaries to check whether they are working with authentic language material to explain words and how easy or difficult it is for a user to understand the explained issues. In grammars the different features of a language are considered systematically. Spoken and written language material is described. Nowadays the grammarians are working together with Universities or at least base their entries on large databases that include millions of texts taken out of various forms of writing and communication situations. This system is meant to help to provide the use of authentic language material that is familiar to the grammar user. In the analysed grammars invented examples are avoided with the aim to offer the user a better access to the explained issue. The aim of this paper is to analyse the used example solutions by keeping an eye on whether they are really authentic and easy to understand or not better than the invented ones that were often used in former times.

Language Material in Grammars and Dictionaries

Language Material in Grammars and Dictionaries
Author: Sina Bröcker
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
Total Pages: 53
Release: 2007-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 3638691969

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2+, University of Rostock (Institut für Sprachwissenschaft), course: Hauptseminar: Corpus dictionaries and lexical structure, language: English, abstract: The first dictionary was published in 1984. At that time the focus lay on lexicography especially on English as an international language. Nowadays nearly every three month new dictionaries appear. They are mainly published from publishing houses in Great Britain. This is due to the dominance which British lexicography won in the 1960s. When the first Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English appeared in 1978 British lexicography had finally won dominance to American lexicography. In 1987 the second edition of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English and the Collins COBUILD Dictionary of the English language appeared. These works were completely different to the ones before. According to Sidney I. Landau these works were "in many respects a daring departure from the customary practices of lexicography, and particularly of ESL lexicography" . They offered a new look at what the user needed. The aim of this paper is to take a closer look on these dictionaries to check whether they are working with authentic language material to explain words and how easy or difficult it is for a user to understand the explained issues. In grammars the different features of a language are considered systematically. Spoken and written language material is described. Nowadays the grammarians are working together with Universities or at least base their entries on large databases that include millions of texts taken out of various forms of writing and communication situations. This system is meant to help to provide the use of authentic language material that is familiar to the grammar user. In the analysed grammars invented examples are avoided with the aim to offer the user a better access to the explained issue. The a

Catching Language

Catching Language
Author: Felix K. Ameka
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 671
Release: 2008-08-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110197693

Descriptive grammars are our main vehicle for documenting and analysing the linguistic structure of the world's 6,000 languages. They bring together, in one place, a coherent treatment of how the whole language works, and therefore form the primary source of information on a given language, consulted by a wide range of users: areal specialists, typologists, theoreticians of any part of language (syntax, morphology, phonology, historical linguistics etc.), and members of the speech communities concerned. The writing of a descriptive grammar is a major intellectual challenge, that calls on the grammarian to balance a respect for the language's distinctive genius with an awareness of how other languages work, to combine rigour with readability, to depict structural regularities while respecting a corpus of real material, and to represent something of the native speaker's competence while recognising the variation inherent in any speech community. Despite a recent surge of awareness of the need to document little-known languages, there is no book that focusses on the manifold issues that face the author of a descriptive grammar. This volume brings together contributors who approach the problem from a range of angles. Most have written descriptive grammars themselves, but others represent different types of reader. Among the topics they address are: overall issues of grammar design, the complementary roles of outsider and native speaker grammarians, the balance between grammar and lexicon, cross-linguistic comparability, the role of explanation in grammatical description, the interplay of theory and a range of fieldwork methods in language description, the challenges of describing languages in their cultural and historical context, and the tensions between linguistic particularity, established practice of particular schools of linguistic description and the need for a universally commensurable analytic framework. This book will renew the field of grammaticography, addressing a multiple readership of descriptive linguists, typologists, and formal linguists, by bringing together a range of distinguished practitioners from around the world to address these questions.

A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics

A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics
Author: R.L. Trask
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2013-04-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1134884214

This dictionary of grammatical terms covers both current and traditional terminology in syntax and morphology. It includes descriptive terms, the major theoretical concepts of the most influential grammatical frameworks, and the chief terms from mathematical and computational linguistics. It contains over 1500 entries, providing definitions and examples, pronunciations, the earliest sources of terms and suggestions for further reading, and recommendations about competing and conflicting usages. The book focuses on non-theory-boumd descriptive terms, which are likely to remain current for some years. Aimed at students and teachers of linguistics, it allows a reader puzzled by a grammatical term to look it up and locate further reading with ease.

Oxford Companion to the English Language

Oxford Companion to the English Language
Author: Tom McArthur
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 920
Release: 2018-05-14
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 0191073873

The Oxford Companion to the English Language provides an authoritative single-volume source of information about the English language. It is intended both for reference and for browsing. The first edition of this landmark Companion, published in 1998, adopted a strong international perspective, covering topics from Cockney to Creole, Aboriginal English to Caribbean English and a historical range from Chaucer to Chomsky, Latin to the World Wide Web. It succinctly described and discussed the English language at the end of the twentieth century, including its distribution and varieties, its cultural, political, and educational impact worldwide, its nature, origins, and prospects, and its pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, word-formation, and usage. This new edition notably focuses on World Englishes, English language teaching, English as an international language, and the effect of technological advances on the English language. More than 130 new entries include African American English, British Sign Language, China English, digital literacy, multimodality, social networking, superdiversity, and text messaging, among many others. It also includes new biographical entries on key individuals who have had an impact on the English language in recent decades, including Beryl (Sue) Atkins, Adam Kilgariff, and John Sinclair. It is an invaluable reference for English Language students, and fascinating reading for any general reader with an interest in language.

The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages

The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages
Author: Peter K. Austin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 581
Release: 2011-03-24
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 113950083X

It is generally agreed that about 7,000 languages are spoken across the world today and at least half may no longer be spoken by the end of this century. This state-of-the-art Handbook examines the reasons behind this dramatic loss of linguistic diversity, why it matters, and what can be done to document and support endangered languages. The volume is relevant not only to researchers in language endangerment, language shift and language death, but to anyone interested in the languages and cultures of the world. It is accessible both to specialists and non-specialists: researchers will find cutting-edge contributions from acknowledged experts in their fields, while students, activists and other interested readers will find a wealth of readable yet thorough and up-to-date information.

A Frequency Dictionary of Turkish

A Frequency Dictionary of Turkish
Author: Yeşim Aksan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 856
Release: 2016-12-08
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1317557565

A Frequency Dictionary of Turkish enables students of all levels to build on their study of Turkish in an efficient and engaging way. Based on a 50 million word corpus, A Frequency Dictionary of Turkish provides a list of core vocabulary for learners of Turkish as a second or foreign language. It gives the most updated, reliable frequency guidelines for common vocabulary in spoken and written Turkish. Each of the 5000 entries are supported by detailed information including the English equivalent, an illustrative example with English translation and usage statistics. The Dictionary provides a rich resource for language teaching and curriculum design, while a separate CD version provides the full text in a tab-delimited format ideally suited for use by corpus and computational linguists. With entries arranged by frequency, by suffixation and alphabetically, A Frequency Dictionary of Turkish enables students of all levels to get the most out of their study of vocabulary in an engaging and efficient way.

Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Grammar and Dictionary (2 Vols.)

Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Grammar and Dictionary (2 Vols.)
Author: Franklin Edgerton
Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass
Total Pages: 905
Release:
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 8120809971

This is the first attempt at a description of the grammar and lexicon of Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit. Most North Indian Buddhist texts are composed in it. It is based primarily on an old Middle Indic vernacular not otherwise identifiable. But there seems reason to believe that it contains features that were borrowed from other Middle Indic dialects. In other words, even its Middle Indic aspects are dialectically somewhat mixed. Most strikingly, however, BHS was also extensively influenced by Sanskrit from the very beginning of the tradition as it has been transmitted to us, and increasingly as time went on. Many (especially later) products of this tradition have often, though misleadingly, been called simply 'Sanskrit', without qualification. In principle, the author has excluded from the grammar and dictionary all forms which are standard Sanskrit, and all words which are used in standard Sanskrit with the same meanings.