Linguistic Perspectives on the Construction of Meaning and Knowledge

Linguistic Perspectives on the Construction of Meaning and Knowledge
Author: Elke Diedrichsen
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 407
Release: 2019-09-24
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1527540421

This book is an exploration of the dimensions of meaning in language from several important perspectives that are of major interest to scholars today, bringing together studies from the realms of linguistic pragmatics, semantics, ontological knowledge engineering, and computational linguistics. Situated within modern functional-cognitive constructional-ontological and computational paradigms, the analyses here are supported by authentic language data, including corpus data, from a rich set of languages. Context and situation play an important but complex role in meaning elaboration. The role of context and situation is elusive and has proved difficult to elucidate with respect to meaning and knowledge representation. This volume provides evidence of the nature of the, often rapid, emergence of meaning in the digital world of the internet, social media, and Internet memes. The use of computational avatars and the rise of human language technologies, including big data and digital corpora, have made the construction of meaning and human language understanding essential to the work of linguists, cognitive scientists and computer scientists who are increasingly working together in collaborative teams to share insights.

Aspects of Meaning Construction

Aspects of Meaning Construction
Author: Günter Radden
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2007-04-11
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027292558

Meaning does not reside in linguistic units but is constructed in the minds of the language users. Meaning construction is an on-line mental activity whereby speech participants create meanings on the basis of underspecified linguistic units. The construction of meaning is guided by cognitive principles. The contributions collected in the volume focus on two types of cognitive principles guiding meaning construction: meaning construction by means of metonymy and metaphor, and meaning construction by means of mental spaces and conceptual blending. The papers in the former group survey experiential evidence of figurative meaning construction and discuss high-level metaphor and metonymy, the role of metonymy in discourse, the chaining of metonymies, metonymy as an alternative to coercion, and metaphtonymic meanings of proper names. The papers in the latter group address the issues of meaning construction prompted by personal pronouns, relative clauses, inferential constructions, “sort-of” expressions, questions, and the into-causative construction.

Linguistic Perspectives on the Construction of Meaning and Knowledge

Linguistic Perspectives on the Construction of Meaning and Knowledge
Author: Brian Nolan
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 410
Release: 2019-11
Genre: Language and languages
ISBN: 9781527538993

This book is an exploration of the dimensions of meaning in language from several important perspectives that are of major interest to scholars today, bringing together studies from the realms of linguistic pragmatics, semantics, ontological knowledge engineering, and computational linguistics. Situated within modern functional-cognitive constructional-ontological and computational paradigms, the analyses here are supported by authentic language data, including corpus data, from a rich set of languages. Context and situation play an important but complex role in meaning elaboration. The role of context and situation is elusive and has proved difficult to elucidate with respect to meaning and knowledge representation. This volume provides evidence of the nature of the, often rapid, emergence of meaning in the digital world of the internet, social media, and Internet memes. The use of computational avatars and the rise of human language technologies, including big data and digital corpora, have made the construction of meaning and human language understanding essential to the work of linguists, cognitive scientists and computer scientists who are increasingly working together in collaborative teams to share insights.

Language in Use

Language in Use
Author: Andrea E. Tyler
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2005-03-23
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9781589013568

Language in Use creatively brings together, for the first time, perspectives from cognitive linguistics, language acquisition, discourse analysis, and linguistic anthropology. The physical distance between nations and continents, and the boundaries between different theories and subfields within linguistics have made it difficult to recognize the possibilities of how research from each of these fields can challenge, inform, and enrich the others. This book aims to make those boundaries more transparent and encourages more collaborative research. The unifying theme is studying how language is used in context and explores how language is shaped by the nature of human cognition and social-cultural activity. Language in Use examines language processing and first language learning and illuminates the insights that discourse and usage-based models provide in issues of second language learning. Using a diverse array of methodologies, it examines how speakers employ various discourse-level resources to structure interaction and create meaning. Finally, it addresses issues of language use and creation of social identity. Unique in approach and wide-ranging in application, the contributions in this volume place emphasis on the analysis of actual discourse and the insights that analyses of such data bring to language learning as well as how language shapes and reflects social identity—making it an invaluable addition to the library of anyone interested in cutting-edge linguistics.

The Meaning Makers

The Meaning Makers
Author: Gordon Wells
Publisher: Multilingual Matters
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2009
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1847691986

The Meaning Makers traces the language and literacy development of a large, representative sample of children from age 1 to 10, quoting liberally from observations made at home and at school. Setting the findings of the study in the context of recent research, it offers suggestions for improving children's opportunities for learning.

Futuristic and Linguistic Perspectives on Teaching Writing to Second Language Students

Futuristic and Linguistic Perspectives on Teaching Writing to Second Language Students
Author: Hanc?-Azizoglu, Eda Ba?ak
Publisher: IGI Global
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2020-12-11
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 179986510X

The aptitude to write well is increasingly becoming a vital element that students need to succeed in college and their future careers. Students must be equipped with competent writing skills as colleges and jobs base the acceptance of students and workers on the quality of their writing. This situation captures the complexity of the fact that writing represents higher intellectual skills and leads to a higher rate of selection. Therefore, it is imperative that best strategies for teaching writing speakers of other languages is imparted to provide insights to teachers who can better prepare their students for future accomplishments. Futuristic and Linguistic Perspectives on Teaching Writing to Second Language Students examines the theoretical and practical implications that should be put in place for second language writers and offers critical futuristic and linguistic perspectives on teaching writing to speakers of other languages. Highlighting such topics as EFL, ESL, composition, digital storytelling, and forming identity, this book is ideal for second language teachers and writing instructors, as well as academicians, professionals, researchers, and students working in the field of language and linguistics.

A Principled Approach to Language Assessment

A Principled Approach to Language Assessment
Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 113
Release: 2020-09-19
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0309675480

The United States is formally represented around the world by approximately 14,000 Foreign Service officers and other personnel in the U.S. Department of State. Roughly one-third of them are required to be proficient in the local languages of the countries to which they are posted. To achieve this language proficiency for its staff, the State Department's Foreign Service Institute (FSI) provides intensive language instruction and assesses the proficiency of personnel before they are posted to a foreign country. The requirement for language proficiency is established in law and is incorporated in personnel decisions related to job placement, promotion, retention, and pay. A Principled Approach to Language Assessment: Considerations for the U.S. Foreign Service Institute evaluates the different approaches that exist to assess foreign language proficiency that FSI could potentially use. This report considers the key assessment approaches in the research literature that are appropriate for language testing, including, but not limited to, assessments that use task-based or performance-based approaches, adaptive online test administration, and portfolios.

The Cambridge Handbook of Intercultural Pragmatics

The Cambridge Handbook of Intercultural Pragmatics
Author: Istvan Kecskes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 1094
Release: 2022-10-20
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 110887939X

Intercultural pragmatics addresses one of the major issues of human communication in the globalized world: how do people interact with each other in a language other than their native tongue, and with native speakers of the language of interaction? Bringing together a globally-representative team of scholars, this Handbook provides an authoritative overview to this fascinating field of study, as well as a theoretical framework. Chapters are grouped into 5 thematic areas: theoretical foundation, key issues in Intercultural Pragmatics research, the interface between Intercultural Pragmatics and related disciplines, Intercultural Pragmatics in different types of communication, and language learning. It addresses key concepts and research issues in Intercultural Pragmatics, and will trigger fresh lines of enquiry and generate new research questions. Comprehensive in its scope, it is essential reading not only for scholars of pragmatics, but also of discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics, communication, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and second language teaching and learning.

Building Disciplinary Literacies in Content and Language Integrated Learning

Building Disciplinary Literacies in Content and Language Integrated Learning
Author: Julia Hüttner
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2024-06-28
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1040088589

Hüttner and Dalton-Puffer present research demonstrating the tangible benefits of the long-term sustainability of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) on participants’ educational outcomes. The chapters outline the argument that the main benefit of CLIL lies in the fact that learners acquire specific literacy practices linked to the curricular subjects they study via the CLIL language and that these go beyond what is commonly learned and studied within a foreign language curriculum. The book provides an orientation as to how such disciplinary literacy or literacies can be conceptualised and understood, and introduces several models that have served to make disciplinary literacies graspable and visible. The various chapters showcase research and development projects from different geographical and educational contexts and therefore elaborate ideas around disciplinary literacies from different vantage points. This book aims at a wide and varied readership, including graduate students studying applied linguistics, foreign language education, and/or teaching methodology; language teachers; content subject teachers with an interest in the linguistic side of their subject; and teacher trainers.

Exploring Discourse Strategies in Social and Cognitive Interaction

Exploring Discourse Strategies in Social and Cognitive Interaction
Author: Manuela Romano
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2016-03-31
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027267227

This volume offers readers interested in Discourse Analysis and/or Socio-Cognitive models of language a closer view of the relationship between discourse, cognition and society by disclosing how the cognitive mechanisms of discourse processing depend on shared knowledge and situated cognition. An inter- and multidisciplinary approach is proposed that combines theories and methodologies coming from Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Multimodal Metaphor Theory, Critical Discourse Analysis, Narratology, Systemic Functional Linguistics, Appraisal Theory, together with the most recent developments of Socio-Cognitive Linguistics, for the analysis of real communicative events, which range from TV reality shows, commercials, digital stories or political debates, to technical texts, architectural memorials, newspapers and autobiographical narratives. Still, several key notions are recurrent in all contributions -embodiment, multimodality, conceptual integration, metaphor, and creativity- as the fundamental constituents of discourse processing. It is only through this wide-ranging epistemological and empirical approach that the complexity of discourse strategies in real contexts, i.e. human communication, can be fully comprehended, and that discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics can be brought closer together.