Just about everyone seems to have views about language. Language attitudes and language ideologies permeate our daily lives. Our competence, intelligence, friendliness, trustworthiness, social ...status, group memberships, and so on, are often judged from the way we communicate. Even the speed at which we speak can evoke reactions. And we often try to anticipate such judgements as we communicate. In this lively introduction, Peter Garrett draws upon research carried out over recent decades in order to discuss such attitudes and the implications they have for our use of language, for social advantage or discrimination, and for social identity. Using a range of examples that includes punctuation, words, grammar, pronunciation, accents, dialects and languages, this book explores the intricate and fascinating ways in which language influences our everyday thoughts, feelings and behaviour.
The global spread of English has resulted in the emergence of a diverse range of postcolonial varieties around the world. Postcolonial English provides a clear and original account of the evolution ...of these varieties, exploring the historical, social and ecological factors that have shaped all levels of their structure. It argues that while these Englishes have developed new and unique properties which differ greatly from one location to another, their spread and diversification can in fact be explained by a single underlying process, which builds upon the constant relationships and communication needs of the colonizers, the colonized, and other parties. Outlining the stages and characteristics of this process, it applies them in detail to English in sixteen different countries across all continents as well as, in a separate chapter, to a history of American English. Of key interest to sociolinguists, dialectologists, historical linguists and syntacticians alike, this 2007 book provides a fascinating new picture of the growth and evolution of English around the globe.
Language as a Local Practice addresses the questions of language, locality and practice as a way of moving forward in our understanding of how language operates as an integrated social and spatial ...activity.
By taking each of these three elements – language, locality and practice – and exploring how they relate to each other, Language as a Local Practice opens up new ways of thinking about language. It questions assumptions about languages as systems or as countable entities, and suggests instead that language emerges from the activities it performs. To look at language as a practice is to view language as an activity rather than a structure, as something we do rather than a system we draw on, as a material part of social and cultural life rather than an abstract entity.
Language as a Local Practice draws on a variety of contexts of language use, from bank machines to postcards, Indian newspaper articles to fish-naming in the Philippines, urban graffiti to mission statements, suggesting that rather than thinking in terms of language use in context, we need to consider how language, space and place are related, how language creates the contexts where it is used, how languages are the products of socially located activities and how they are part of the action.
Language as a Local Practice will be of interest to students on advanced undergraduate and post graduate courses in Applied Linguistics, Language Education, TESOL, Literacy and Cultural Studies.
1. Introduction: Language as a Local Practice 2. 'Press 1 for English': Practice as the ‘Generic Social Thing’ 3. The Reverend on Ice Again: Similarity, Difference and Relocalization 4. Talking in the City: The Linguistic Landscaping of Locality 5. Kerala Tuskers: Language as Already Local 6. Alibangbang and Ecologies of Local Language Practices. 7 "Molding Hearts… Leading Minds… Touching Lives" Practice as the new discourse? 8. Conclusion: Language as a Local Practice
" Language as a Local Practice is one of the most refreshing linguistics books to appear in a decade. Weaving together different strands of current research, Alastair Pennycook provides new framings and directions for the study of language." - David Barton, University of Lancaster , UK
Distributional semantics embodies the idea that the context in which a word occurs reveals the meaning of that word. In contemporary corpus linguistics, that idea takes shape in various types of ...quantitative context analysis. This monograph explores how count-based token-level semantic vector spaces, as an advanced form of such a quantitative methodology, can be applied to the study of polysemy, lexical variation, and lectometry. What can distributional models reveal about meaning? How can they be used to analyse the semantic relationship between near-synonyms? And how can they contribute to the study of lexical variation as a sociolinguistic variable? The book details the conceptual background of lexical semantic and lexical variation research, explains the mechanism of distributional modelling, and introduces distributional workflows and corpus linguistic tools to answer the questions. Combining a cognitive linguistic interest in meaning with a sociolinguistic interest in variation, it illustrates that distributional methodology with case studies on Dutch and Spanish lexical data, focusing on the value of distributional models for semantic analysis, the interaction of semasiological and onomasiological change, and sociolinguistic issues of lexical standardization and pluricentricity.
To what extent and in what ways is metaphorical thought relevant to an understanding of culture and society? More specifically: can the cognitive linguistic view of metaphor simultaneously explain ...both universality and diversity in metaphorical thought? Cognitive linguists have done important work on universal aspects of metaphor, but they have paid much less attention to why metaphors vary both interculturally and intraculturally as extensively as they do. In this book, Zoltán Kövecses proposes a new theory of metaphor variation. First, he identifies the major dimension of metaphor variation, that is, those social and cultural boundaries that signal discontinuities in human experience. Second, he describes which components, or aspects of conceptual metaphor are involved in metaphor variation, and how they are involved. Third, he isolates the main causes of metaphor variation. Fourth Professor Kövecses addresses the issue to the degree of cultural coherence in the interplay among conceptual metaphors, embodiment, and causes of metaphor variation.
This study offers a pragmatic dimension to World Englishes research. It is particularly timely because pragmatics has generally been understudied in past research on World Englishes, especially ...postcolonial Englishes. Apart from drawing attention to the paucity of research, the book also contributes to theory formation on the emerging theoretical framework, postcolonial pragmatics, which is then applied to data from two World (postcolonial) Englishes, Ghanaian and Cameroon Englishes. The copious examples used clearly illustrate how postcolonial societies realise various pragmatic phenomena, in this case offers and offer refusals, and how these could be fruitfully explained using an analytical framework designed on the complex internal set ups of these societies. For research on social interaction in these societies to be representative, it has to take into account the complex history of their evolution, contact with other systems during colonialism, and the heritages thereof. This book does just that.
Structural variations (SVs) or copy number variations (CNVs) greatly impact the functions of the genes encoded in the genome and are responsible for diverse human diseases. Although a number of ...existing SV detection algorithms can detect many types of SVs using whole genome sequencing (WGS) data, no single algorithm can call every type of SVs with high precision and high recall.
We comprehensively evaluate the performance of 69 existing SV detection algorithms using multiple simulated and real WGS datasets. The results highlight a subset of algorithms that accurately call SVs depending on specific types and size ranges of the SVs and that accurately determine breakpoints, sizes, and genotypes of the SVs. We enumerate potential good algorithms for each SV category, among which GRIDSS, Lumpy, SVseq2, SoftSV, Manta, and Wham are better algorithms in deletion or duplication categories. To improve the accuracy of SV calling, we systematically evaluate the accuracy of overlapping calls between possible combinations of algorithms for every type and size range of SVs. The results demonstrate that both the precision and recall for overlapping calls vary depending on the combinations of specific algorithms rather than the combinations of methods used in the algorithms.
These results suggest that careful selection of the algorithms for each type and size range of SVs is required for accurate calling of SVs. The selection of specific pairs of algorithms for overlapping calls promises to effectively improve the SV detection accuracy.
This book presents a controversial theory about the formation of new colonial dialects, examining Latin American Spanish, Canadian French, and North American English, with a special focus on ...Australian, South African, and New Zealand English.
Language policy is all about choices. If you are bilingual or plurilingual, you have to choose which language to use. Even if you speak only one language, you have choices of dialects and styles. ...Some of these choices are the result of management, reflecting conscious and explicit efforts by language managers to control the choices. This book presents a specific theory of language management. Bernard Spolsky reviews research on the family, religion, the workplace, the media, schools, legal and health institutions, the military and government. Also discussed are language activists, international organisations, and human rights relative to language, and the book concludes with a review of language managers and management agencies. A model is developed that recognises the complexity of language management, makes sense of the various forces involved, and clarifies why it is such a difficult enterprise.
PDF
