The C-ORAL-ROM book and DVD provide a unique set of comparable corpora of spontaneous speech for the main Romance languages, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. The corpora are accompanied by comparative linguistic studies, models and standard linguistic measures of spoken language variability. Each corpus is built to the same design using identical sampling techniques, and each corpus is presented in multimedia format, allowing simultaneous access to aligned acoustic and textual information. Texts are headed with information about provenance, participants, etc. and the transcriptions show changes of speaker. Speech acts are tagged according to the evidence of prosodic criteria. Each corpus totals 300,000 words and presents formal and informal speech in a variety of contexts of use, dialogue structure and text genres, semantic domains and speech act typologies. The corpora have great statistical relevance for spoken language structures and can address key issues in human language technology such as speech recognition in unrestricted discourse, the suitability of speech synthesis in natural prosody, and multilingual applications of the spoken language interface. The work provides new data and innovative theoretical perspectives that are relevant for corpus linguistics, romance linguistics, syntactic theory, speech and prosody research, and second language acquisition.
This volume provides a unique cross-disciplinary perspective on the external ecological and internal psycholinguistic factors that determine sign bilingualism, its development and maintenance at the individual and societal levels. Multiple aspects concerning the dynamics of contact situations involving a signed and a spoken or a written language are covered in detail, i.e. the development of the languages in bilingual deaf children, cross-modal contact phenomena in the productions of child and adult signers, sign bilingual education concepts and practices in diverse social contexts, deaf educational discourse, sign language planning and interpretation. This state-of-the-art collection is enhanced by a final chapter providing a critical appraisal of the major issues emerging from the individual studies in the light of current assumptions in the broader field of contact linguistics. Given the interdependence of research, policy and practice, the insights gathered in the studies presented are not only of scientific interest, but also bear important implications concerning the perception, understanding and promotion of bilingualism in deaf individuals whose language acquisition and use have been ignored for a long time at the socio-political and scientific levels.
Although most children learn language relatively quickly, as many as 10 per cent of them are slow to start speaking and are said to have developmental language disorder (DLD). Children with DLD are managed by a variety of different professionals in different countries, are offered different services for different periods of time and are given a variety of different therapeutic treatments. To date, there has been no attempt to evaluate these different practices. Managing Children with Developmental Language Disorder: Theory and Practice Across Europe and Beyond does just this, reporting on the findings of a survey carried out as part of the work of COST Action IS1406, a European research network. Law and colleagues analyse the results of a pan-European survey, looking at how different services are delivered in different counties, at the cultural factors underpinning such services and the theoretical frameworks used to inform practice in different countries. The book also provides a snapshot of international practices in a set of 35 country-specific "vignettes", providing a benchmark for future developments but also calling attention to the work of key practitioners and thinkers in each of the countries investigated. This book will be essential reading for practitioners working with children with language impairments, those commissioning services and policy in the field and students of speech and language therapy.
The conviction that the development and promotion of the arts, humanities and culture through the study of literature and the aesthetic are the fundamental constituents of any progress in society is at the heart of this volume. The essays gathered here explore the role of the imagination and aesthetic awareness in an age when the corporatization of knowledge is in the process of transforming literary studies, and political commitment is in danger of disappearing behind a supposedly post-ideological late-capitalist consensus. The main focus of the volume is the mutual implication of aesthetics and ideology and the status and value of different types of art within the political arena. Challenging issues in contemporary aesthetics are examined within the wider framework of current debates on the disappearance of the real, the crisis in representation, and the use of new media. The wide range of examples collected here, stretching from experimental poetry in post-war Germany, political commitment in twentieth-century French theatre, and countercultural Rumanian theatre under Ceaușescu, to Neo-Victorian fiction, Verbatim theatre in the UK, and political theatre for the masses in Estonia, vouchsafe unique insights into the intersection of aesthetics and ideology and the practical consequences thereof. As such, the volume opens up a space for a meaningful engagement with authentic forms of art from inside and outside the Anglosphere, and, ultimately, uses these examples as a platform from which to imagine some form of “aesthethics”, representing an ideal union of aesthetics and ideology. This concept, first coined by the French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, will prove to be relevant both within the parameters of the examples discussed here, but also beyond, for the contributors to this volume are unanimous in refusing to believe that aesthetics and ideology can exist one without the other, and in recognizing the centrality of ethics in any discussion of these notions.
There is no longer any doubt about the place that oral language has in problem solving, in developing literacy and the intellect, and in acquiring knowledge.
Damage to the brain can impair language in many different ways, severely harming some linguistic functions whilst sparing others. To achieve some understanding of the apparently bewildering diversity of language disorders, it is necessary to interpret impaired linguistic performance by relating it to a model of normal linguistic performance. Originally published in 1987, this book describes the application of such models of normal language processing to the interpretation of a wide variety of linguistic disorders. It deals with both the production and the comprehension of language, with language at both the sentence and the single-word level, with written as well as with spoken language and with acquired as well as with developmental disorders.
Cet ouvrage se propose de revisiter de façon originale la notion de subordination en français dans la perspective de la linguistique de corpus. Après des chapitres d’introduction où est présenté un cadre descriptif inspiré de l'Approche pronominale étendue à la macrosyntaxe dans la ligne des travaux pionniers de C. Blanche-Benveniste, il rassemble un ensemble d’études monographiques des principaux types de conjonctions de subordination du français à partir d'analyses quantitatives et qualitatives d’exemples tirés de corpus écrits et oraux prenant en compte les variations attachées à divers genres de texte dans les deux domaines. Ces études synchroniques révèlent l’importance de ces morphèmes, généralement étudiés comme de simples outils grammaticaux, dans l’organisation du discours et la gestion de l’interaction. Elles sont mises en perspective avec une étude diachronique et une étude sur l’acquisition des structures. Les résultats renouvellent la question de la complexité et de l’intégration syntaxique.