OKAY across Languages

OKAY across Languages PDF Author: Emma Betz
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027260281
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
OKAY has been termed ‘a spectacular expression’ and ‘America’s greatest invention.’ This volume offers an in-depth empirical study of the uses that have resulted from its global spread. Focusing on actions and interactional practices, it investigates OKAY in a variety of settings in 13 languages. The collected work showcases the importance of a holistic analysis: prosodic realization and the placement of OKAY in its larger sequential and multimodal context emerge as constitutive for distinct uses in individual languages. An inductive approach makes it possible to identify practices not previously documented, for example OKAY used for ‘qualified acceptance’ or as a ‘continuer’, and to document a core of recurrent, similar uses across languages. This work also outlines new research directions for comparative analysis by offering first insights into the diachronic development of OKAY’s uses and the relationship of OKAY to other particles in specific languages.

OKAY across Languages

OKAY across Languages PDF Author: Emma Betz
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027260281
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 450

Get Book

Book Description
OKAY has been termed ‘a spectacular expression’ and ‘America’s greatest invention.’ This volume offers an in-depth empirical study of the uses that have resulted from its global spread. Focusing on actions and interactional practices, it investigates OKAY in a variety of settings in 13 languages. The collected work showcases the importance of a holistic analysis: prosodic realization and the placement of OKAY in its larger sequential and multimodal context emerge as constitutive for distinct uses in individual languages. An inductive approach makes it possible to identify practices not previously documented, for example OKAY used for ‘qualified acceptance’ or as a ‘continuer’, and to document a core of recurrent, similar uses across languages. This work also outlines new research directions for comparative analysis by offering first insights into the diachronic development of OKAY’s uses and the relationship of OKAY to other particles in specific languages.

In the Land of Invented Languages

In the Land of Invented Languages PDF Author: Arika Okrent
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0385529716
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Here is the captivating story of humankind’s enduring quest to build a better language—and overcome the curse of Babel. Just about everyone has heard of Esperanto, which was nothing less than one man’s attempt to bring about world peace by means of linguistic solidarity. And every Star Trek fan knows about Klingon. But few people have heard of Babm, Blissymbolics, Loglan (not to be confused with Lojban), and the nearly nine hundred other invented languages that represent the hard work, high hopes, and full-blown delusions of so many misguided souls over the centuries. With intelligence and humor, Arika Okrent has written a truly original and enlightening book for all word freaks, grammar geeks, and plain old language lovers.

Discourse Across Languages and Cultures

Discourse Across Languages and Cultures PDF Author: Carol Lynn Moder
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027230782
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
This volume seeks to answers such questions as: how is conscious experience translated into discourse? How are foregrounding and backgrounding accomplished? What is the function of features like lexical choice and referential choice? And many more.

Fluency and Disfluency Across Languages and Language Varieties

Fluency and Disfluency Across Languages and Language Varieties PDF Author: Liesbeth Degand
Publisher: Presses universitaires de Louvain
ISBN: 2875587692
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Fluency and disfluency are characteristic of online language production and may be signalled by markers such as filled and unfilled pauses, discourse markers, repeats or self-repairs, which can be said to reflect ongoing mechanisms of processing and monitoring. The Fluency & Disfluency across Languages and Language Varieties conference held at the University of Louvain in February 2017 marked the closing of a five-year research project dedicated to the multimodal and contrastive investigation of fluency and disfluency in (L1 and L2) English, French and French Belgian sign language, with a focus on variation according to language, speaker and genre. The closing conference was intended as an opportunity to further expand the range of languages, language varieties and genres studied from the (dis)fluency perspective. The selection of papers in this volume re ects the diversity of approaches aiming to uncover the ways in which fluency and disfluency are conceived in language production and comprehension and how they are signalled. Topics include methodological challenges in cross-linguistic (dis)fluency research, the role of contextual features in professional and non-professional settings, and the characteristics of fluency and disfluency in second language speech. Of particular importance in all contributions is the ambivalent role of pauses, discourse markers, repeats and other markers, which can be both a symptom of encoding difficulties and a sign that the speaker is trying to help the hearer decode the message. They should thus be interpreted in context to identify their contribution to fluency and/or disfluency, which can be viewed as two sides of the same coin.

Language across Languages

Language across Languages PDF Author: Emanuele Miola
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443883115
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
Since the first written documents in the history of mankind (produced at the end of the 4th millennium BC), translation has always played a pivotal role in human societies. Translators were needed whenever the need for contact between different-speaking communities arose, such as for the purposes of communication, commerce, and declarations of war, or peace. Translation is even more important in today’s world. Globalization has brought the nations of the Earth closer, to the extent that books, movies and television programs released or aired far away in the world are just a click of the mouse away. However, such cultural products still have to be translated in order to be enjoyed by a wider audience. In international relations, diplomacies work very much on the basis of what is said and written, meaning that official documents and political charts need to be correctly and precisely translated. Hi-tech devices, such as tablets and smartphones, have their software translated into an increasing number of languages, in order to be accessible to a larger number of people. The challenging issues that arise for translation studies from these socio-cultural changes in Western Europe and all over the world are tackled in this volume according to two intertwined viewpoints: From a strictly linguistic perspective, typological differences between genetically unrelated languages challenge linguists in gaining an overall understanding of what language really is: how can linguistic categories, be they verbal, nominal or pertaining to other domains of the grammar, be defined? How are they shaped in syntax? From the point of view of anthropological linguistics, on the other hand, the cross-linguistic differences that come to the fore illustrate that translating – as well as language itself – is one of the basic cognitive strategies of the human mind.

Between Turn and Sequence

Between Turn and Sequence PDF Author: John Heritage
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027264287
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
The last two decades have witnessed a remarkable growth of interest in what are variously termed discourse markers or discourse particles. The greatest area of growth has centered on particles that occur in sentence-initial or turn-initial position, and this interest intersects with a long-standing focus in Conversation Analysis on turn-taking and turn-construction. This volume brings together conversation analytic studies of turn-initial particles in interactions in fourteen languages geographically widely distributed (Europe, America, Asia and Australia). The contributions show the significance of turn-initial particles in three key areas of turn and sequence organization: (i) the management of departures from expected next actions, (ii) the projection of the speaker's epistemic stance, and (iii) the management of overall activities implemented across sequences. Taken together the papers demonstrate the crucial importance of the positioning of particles within turns and sequences for the projection and management of social actions, and for relationships between speakers.

A Pragmatic Agenda for Healthcare

A Pragmatic Agenda for Healthcare PDF Author: Sarah Bigi
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027249377
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
This volume addresses the issue of pragmatic meaning and interpretation in communication contexts regarding health and does so by combining a series of diverse and complementary approaches, which together highlight the relevance of successfully shared understanding to achieve more accessible, inclusive, and sustainable healthcare systems. The volume is divided into five thematic sections: 1) Analytical approaches to health communication, 2) Intercultural and mediated communication, 3) Negotiation and meaning construction, 4) Expertise and common ground, 5) Uncertainty and evasive answers, bringing together a group of top scholars on the much-debated issue of shared understanding both at the micro-level of dialogues between professionals and patients, and the macro-level of institutional communication. In the variety of its contributions, it represents an ambitious attempt at setting pragmatics at the core of healthcare communication research and practice, by combining conceptual reflections on core topics in the field of pragmatics (among which are speech acts, common ground, ambiguity, implicitness), with discourse and linguistic analysis of real-world examples exploring various problems in health communication.

Spoken Corpora in Applied Linguistics

Spoken Corpora in Applied Linguistics PDF Author: Mari Carmen Campoy
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039112753
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This volume explores the opportunities that spoken corpora offer and the challenges of research with such corpora. The use and applications of spoken corpora are discussed from the perspective of both language analysis and language pedagogy. Twelve chapters written by corpus linguists analyse an extensive number of spoken corpora based on the oral production of speakers as varied as language learners, users of English as Lingua Franca, native speakers, or speakers of English in academic contexts. This book also highlights the growing emphasis on the use of corpus-based research by examining the implications of corpus findings in educational settings.

Puzzles in Logic, Languages and Computation

Puzzles in Logic, Languages and Computation PDF Author: Dragomir Radev
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3642343724
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
This is the second volume of a unique collection that brings together the best English-language problems created for students competing in the Computational Linguistics Olympiad. These problems are representative of the diverse areas presented in the competition and designed with three principles in mind: · To challenge the student analytically, without requiring any explicit knowledge or experience in linguistics or computer science; · To expose the student to the different kinds of reasoning required when encountering a new phenomenon in a language, both as a theoretical topic and as an applied problem; · To foster the natural curiosity students have about the workings of their own language, as well as to introduce them to the beauty and structure of other languages; · To learn about the models and techniques used by computers to understand human language. Aside from being a fun intellectual challenge, the Olympiad mimics the skills used by researchers and scholars in the field of computational linguistics. In an increasingly global economy where businesses operate across borders and languages, having a strong pool of computational linguists is a competitive advantage, and an important component to both security and growth in the 21st century. This collection of problems is a wonderful general introduction to the field of linguistics through the analytic problem solving technique. "A fantastic collection of problems for anyone who is curious about how human language works! These books take serious scientific questions and present them in a fun, accessible way. Readers exercise their logical thinking capabilities while learning about a wide range of human languages, linguistic phenomena, and computational models. " - Kevin Knight, USC Information Sciences Institute

Language-Specific Factors in First Language Acquisition

Language-Specific Factors in First Language Acquisition PDF Author: Anne-Katharina Harr
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 1614511748
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
A growing number of studies have begun to examine the influence of language-specific factors on language acquisition. During language acquisition, German children from six years on use structures that are similar to those of adults in their language group and also encode all semantic components from an early age. In striking contrast, French children up to ten years have difficulties producing some of the complex structures that are necessary for the simultaneous expression of several semantic components. Nonetheless, in addition to these striking cross-linguistic differences, the results of this study also clearly show similar developmental progressions in other respects, suggesting the impact of general developmental determinants.