Subject collection: Linguistics (2,773 titles, 1967–2015)

Metrics is often defined as a discipline that concerns itself with the study of meters. In this volume the term is used in a broader sense that more or less coincides with the traditional notion of “versification”. Understood this way, metrics is an eminently complex object that displays variation over time and in space, that concerns forms of a great variety and with different statuses (meters, rhymes, stanzas, prescribed forms, syllabification rules, nursery rhymes, slogans, musical textsetting, ablaut reduplication etc.), and that as a cultural manifestation is performed in a variety of ways (sung, chanted, spoken, read) that can have direct consequences on how it is structured. This profusion of forms is thought to correspond, at the level of perception, to a limited number of cognitive mechanisms that allow us to perceive and to represent regularly iterating forms. This volume proposes a relatively coherent overall vision by distinguishing four main families of metrical forms, each clearly independent of the others and amenable to separate typologies.

This book explores a virtually untapped, yet fascinating research area: television dialogue. It reports on a study comparing the language of the American situation comedy Friends to natural conversation. Transcripts of the television show and the American English conversation portion of the Longman Grammar Corpus provide the data for this corpus-based investigation, which combines Douglas Biber’s multidimensional methodology with a frequency-based analysis of close to 100 linguistic features. As a natural offshoot of the research design, this study offers a comprehensive description of the most common linguistic features characterizing natural conversation. Illustrated with numerous dialogue extracts from Friends and conversation, topics such as vague, emotional, and informal language are discussed. This book will be an important resource not only for researchers and students specializing in discourse analysis, register variation, and corpus linguistics, but also anyone interested in conversational language and television dialogue.

Language Resources (LRs) are sets of language data and descriptions in machine readable form, such as written and spoken language corpora, terminological databases, computational lexica and dictionaries, and linguistic software tools. Over the past few decades, mainly within research environments, LRs have been specifically used to create, optimise or evaluate natural language processing (NLP) and human language technologies (HLT) applications, including translation-related technologies. Gradually the infrastructures and exploitation tools of LRs are being perceived as core resources in the language services industries and in localisation production settings. However, some efforts ought yet to be made to raise further awareness about LRs in general, and LRs for translation and localisation in particular to a wider audience in all corners of the world. Topics in Language Resources for Translation and Localisation sets out to establish the state of the art of this ever expanding field and underscores the usefulness that LRs can potentially have in the process of creating, adapting, managing, standardising and leveraging content for more than one language and culture from various perspectives.

Taboos are much more than just a synonym of ‘forbidden’. Proof of the concept’s complexity can be found in the way ads often try to hide the taboo inherent to their products or, conversely, in the way certain taboo readings are foregrounded on purpose in other ads. This volume shows why and how that happens, using print and television ads to exemplify (a) the elaborate strategies used by ads for certain products to cleverly hide the taboo inherent to them, and (b) the deliberate recourse to taboo references in ads for products that do not present any taboo connotation. The linguistic analysis undertaken takes into account the different modes (verbal language, music, sound effects, moving and static images) that convey meaning in ads. Taboo is very often conveyed or disguised through one of the channels while the others play the opposite role, thus achieving a balance that prevents the ad from being too obscure to be understood or too daring for the general public to accept it. For this comprehensive approach, concepts are drawn from different disciplines: textual and semiotic analysis from linguistics, theories of taboo from anthropology, and background to advertising from media studies.

The papers in this volume investigate the semantics of aspect from both a theoretical and a crosslinguistic point of view, in a wide range of languages from a number of different language families. The papers are all informed by the belief that a thorough exposure to the expression of aspect crosslinguistically is crucial for progress in understanding how the semantics of aspect works and what the semantic basis of aspectual distinctions is. The languages discussed include Russian, English, Dutch, Hebrew, Mandarin, Japanese and Kalaallisut. The issues discussed in this volume include the centrality of measuring and counting in an understanding of telicity; the importance of the singular/plural distinction in the study of aspect; the importance of homogeneity as a property of event types; the flexibility of lexical classes; and the interaction between expressions of aspect and the particular morphosyntactic structure of a language.

Controversies may be particularly prominent in one or another culture. Yet, there is hardly any culture where they do not exist. This book assumes that the practice of controversy, along with its theorization, constitutes – in each of the cultures and disciplines where it develops – a tradition. Whether there are enough shared elements in these traditions to consider them as, fundamentally, universal or not is something that can only be determined on the basis of a rich sample of controversies and theorizations thereof belonging to different traditions. This is what this volume provides to the reader. By presenting side by side controversies from the East and from the West, from the ancient past up to the present, from different domains of scholarship and action, the reader is in a position not only to admire the widespread nature, role, and richness of the phenomenon, but also to begin to evaluate its variety as well as universality. While the editors have purposefully avoided comparative studies of traditions of controversy, in order to focus on each tradition so to speak from its practitioners’ point of view, some of the chapters take a bird’s eye view and exemplify how such studies can be systematically conducted. In a world that is globalizing itself at a fast pace, the awareness of the multiplicity of traditions of controversy is fundamental for ensuring both that the integration of the various perspectives is harmonious and that each one of them is granted its place in a plural universe.

Translation as a profession provides an in-depth analysis of the translating profession and the translation industry. The book starts with a presentation of the diversity of translations and an overview of the translation-localisation process. The second section describes the translation profession and the translators’ markets. The third section considers the process of ‘becoming’ a translator, from the moment people find out whether they have the required qualities to the moment when they set up shop or find a job, with special emphasis on how to find and hold on to clients, avoiding basic mistakes. The fourth section concentrates on the vital professional issues of costs, rates, deadlines, time to market, productivity, ethics, standards, qualification, certification, and professional recognition. The fifth section is devoted to the developments that have provoked ongoing changes in the profession and industry, such as ICT, and the impact of industrialisation, internationalisation, and globalisation. The final section is devoted to the major issues involved in translator training. A glossary is provided, together with a list of Websites for further browsing.

This volume addresses the need for a more considered and systematic approach to teacher education and training in Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL), in all its forms: Technology Enhanced Language Learning, Network-Based Language Learning, Information and Communication Technologies for Language Learning and so on. The 20 chapters of the book are divided into five parts: (1) foundations of teacher education in CALL; (2) CALL degree programs; (3) CALL pre-service courses; (4) CALL in-service projects, courses, and workshops; (5) alternatives to formal CALL training. The chapters cover a broad range of levels, environments, countries, and languages. Rather than simply offering inspired speculation, the chapters provide practical information to readers, reporting on what has actually been done in a wide variety of teacher education programs and courses around the world. In many cases, the chapters describe how programs and courses have evolved, and include either qualitative or quantitative research, or both, to inform the structure of CALL courses, tasks and activities.