Cross-linguistic Correspondences

Cross-linguistic Correspondences PDF Author: Thomas Egan
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027264724
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Book Description
Contrastive Linguistics is an expanding field, as witnessed by the publication in recent years of an increasing number of monographs, collected volumes and journal articles. The present volume, which comprises an introduction and ten chapters dealing with lexical contrasts between English and other languages, shows advances within the well-established lexical work in the field. Each of the chapters takes lexical items as its starting point and compares English with one or more languages. The languages represented are Spanish, Lithuanian, Swedish, German, Norwegian and Czech. Furthermore, they emphasise the link between lexis and grammar, not only within the same language, but also across languages. Finally, several studies represent one of the more recent developments of contrastive linguistics, namely a growing focus on genre and register comparisons. The book should appeal to both established scholars and advanced students with an interest in lexis, genre, corpus linguistics and/or contrastive linguistics.

Cross-Linguistic Perspectives on Verb Constructions

Cross-Linguistic Perspectives on Verb Constructions PDF Author: Signe Oksefjell Ebeling
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443882305
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Book Description
This volume sheds new light on verb constructions by exposing them to cross-linguistic analysis based on multilingual corpora. It is composed of nine studies which provide insights into various aspects of cross-linguistic diversity, including showing that seemingly equivalent verb constructions may differ in their semantics, and that similar meanings may be expressed by different types of constructions. In other words, this book shows that different languages have different ways of lexicalising verb-based meanings, most notably by means of other, divergent verb constructions. A range of lexicogrammatical aspects of verb constructions are explored throughout the book, including time reference; modality; voice; light verb constructions; non-finite complementation of lexical verbs; posture-verb constructions; semiperiphrastic constructions; and the construction and semantic composition of verbs of putting. All of the contributions consider English in comparison with at least one of the following languages: Czech, German, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish. As such, this volume offers a truly multilingual perspective on verb constructions. The diversity of comparisons also highlights the multi-faceted nature of the verb phrase, which seems to have virtually limitless potential for exploration in the fields of tense, aspect, modality, lexical semantics, syntax, and phraseology.

Teaching for Biliteracy

Teaching for Biliteracy PDF Author: Karen Beeman
Publisher: Brookes Publishing Company
ISBN: 9781934000090
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The concept of bridging between languages is introduced to the biliteracy filed in this practical professional development guide for teachers, administrators, and leadership teams.

Information Structure in a Cross-Linguistic Perspective

Information Structure in a Cross-Linguistic Perspective PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004334254
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Book Description
The present volume draws together contributions from a number of scholars with an interest in empirical, cross-linguistic description. Most of the papers were first presented at the symposium Information Structure in a Cross-linguistic Perspective held in Oslo in November/December 2000. The descriptions are functionally oriented, and their common focus is how information structure – in a broad sense – can be compared across languages. 'Information structure' has been approached in a variety of ways by the authors, so as to give a broad picture of this fundamental principle of text production, involving the way in which a speaker/writer chooses to present a message in terms of given/new information, focus, cohesion, and point of view. Central to much of the research is the problem of establishing criteria for isolating linguistic constraints on language use from cultural-linguistic conventions in text production. The linguistic comparison includes English, German and/or one of the Scandinavian languages, with sidelights to other languages. Most of the papers are text- or corpus-based, and the ongoing work on parallel corpora in Scandinavia is reflected in several contributions.

Learning to Read and Write

Learning to Read and Write PDF Author: Margaret Harris
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521621847
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Book Description
For many years, the development of theories about the way children learn to read and write was dominated by studies of English-speaking populations. As we have learned more about the way that children learn to read and write other scripts - whether they have less regularity in their grapheme-phoneme correspondences or do not make use of alphabetic symbols at all - it has become clear that many of the difficulties that confront children learning to read and write English specifically are less evident, or even non-existent, in other populations. At the same time, some aspects of learning to read and write are very similar across scripts. The unique cross-linguistic perspective offered in this book, including chapters on Japanese, Greek and the Scandinavian languages as well as English, shows how the processes of learning to read and spell are affected by the characteristics of the writing system that children are learning to master.

Corpora and Cross-Linguistic Research

Corpora and Cross-Linguistic Research PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900465366X
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 390

Book Description
In recent years there has been increasing interest in the development and use of bilingual and multilingual corpora. As Karin Aijmer writes in this book, 'The contrastive or comparative perspective ... makes it possible to dig deeper and to ask new questions about the relationship between languages with the aim of sharpening our conceptions of cross-linguistic correspondences and adding to our knowledge of the languages compared.' The papers in this volume are a showcase of the great variety of purposes to which bilingual and multilingual corpora can be put. They do not only lend themselves to descriptive and applied approaches, but are also suitable for theory-oriented studies. The range of linguistic phenomena covered by the various approaches is very wide; the papers focus on fields of research like syntax, discourse, semantics, information structure, lexis, and translation studies. The range of languages studied comprises English, Norwegian, Swedish, German, Dutch, and Portuguese. In addition to purely linguistic papers, there are contributions on computer programs developed for the compilation and use of bilingual and multilingual corpora.

Cross-linguistic Similarity in Foreign Language Learning

Cross-linguistic Similarity in Foreign Language Learning PDF Author: Håkan Ringbom
Publisher: Multilingual Matters
ISBN: 1788920740
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 153

Book Description
This book explores the importance of cross-linguistic similarity in foreign language learning. While linguists have primarily focussed upon differences between languages, learners strive to make use of any similarities to prior linguistic knowledge they can perceive. The role of positive transfer is emphasized as well as the essential differences between comprehension and production. In comprehension of related languages, cross-linguistic similarities are easily perceived while in comprehension of distant languages they are merely assumed. Production may be based on previous perception of similarities, but frequently similarities are here merely assumed. Initially, effective learning is based on quick establishment of cross-linguistic one-to-one relations between individual items. As learning progresses, the learner learns to modify such oversimplified relations. The book describes the ways in which transfer affects different areas of language, taking account of the differences between learning a language perceived to be similar and a language where few or no cross-linguistic similarities can be established.

A Crosslinguistic Study of the Language of Space

A Crosslinguistic Study of the Language of Space PDF Author: Engin Arik
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443825263
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 170

Book Description
This book examines spatial language in sign languages (Turkish Sign Language, Croatian Sign Language, American Sign Language, and Austrian Sign Language) and spoken languages (Turkish, English, and Croatian). The book presents a novel model, the Crossmodal Spatial Language, to account for similarities and differences in these languages. The model, which consists of Spatial Representations, Reference Frames, Temporal Representations, Conceptual Structure, and Linguistic Representations, shows that the features from spatial input are not necessarily mapped on the spatial descriptions regardless of modality and language. The book reports several studies to examine the descriptions of static and dynamic spatial scenes which involve, among others, spatial relationals such as left-right, front-back, besides, in, on, to, toward, pass by, away, and cause to move. The findings suggest that language users construct a spatial relation between the objects in a given time, employ a reference frame, which may not be encoded in the message, and use the same conceptual structure consisted of BE-AT for static spatial situations and GO-BE-AT for static dynamic situations.

Cross-linguistic Semantics

Cross-linguistic Semantics PDF Author: Cliff Goddard
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027205698
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Book Description
Cross-linguistic semantics – investigating how languages package and express meanings differently – is central to the linguistic quest to understand the nature of human language. This set of studies explores and demonstrates cross-linguistic semantics as practised in the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) framework, originated by Anna Wierzbicka. The opening chapters give a state-of-the-art overview of the NSM model, propose several theoretical innovations and advance a number of original analyses in connection with names and naming, clefts and other specificational sentences, and discourse anaphora. Subsequent chapters describe and analyse diverse phenomena in ten languages from multiple families, geographical locations, and cultural settings around the globe. Three substantial studies document how the metalanguage of NSM semantic primes can be realised in languages of widely differing types: Amharic (Ethiopia), Korean, and East Cree. Each constitutes a lexicogrammatical portrait in miniature of the language concerned. Other chapters probe topics such as inalienable possession in Koromu (Papua New Guinea), epistemic verbs in Swedish, hyperpolysemy in Bunuba (Australia), the expression of "momentariness" in Berber, ethnogeometry in Makasai (East Timor), value concepts in Russian, and “virtuous emotions” in Japanese. This book will be valuable for linguists working on language description, lexical semantics, or the semantics of grammar, for advanced students of linguistics, and for others interested in language universals and language diversity.

Literature, Language and Computing

Literature, Language and Computing PDF Author: Polina Eismont
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9819936047
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Book Description
This book brings together selected revised papers representing a multidisciplinary approach to language and literature. The collection presents studies performed using the methods of computational linguistics in accordance with the traditions of Russian linguistic and literary studies, primarily in line with the Leningrad (Petersburg) philological school. The book comprises the papers allocated into 2 sections discussing the study of corpora in language, translation, and literary studies and the use of computing in language teaching and translation and in emotional text processing. A unique feature of the presented collection is that the papers, compiled in one volume, allow readers to get an understanding of a wide range of research conducted in Saint Petersburg State University and other Russian leading scientific institutions. Both the classical tradition of Saint Petersburg philology and the results obtained with the help of new computer technologies as a sample of the symbiosis of technologies and traditions, which bring research to a qualitatively new level, arouse interest.