Words, Words, Words: Philology and Beyond

Words, Words, Words: Philology and Beyond

Author: Sarah Chevalier

Publisher: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag

Published: 2012-02-15

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 3772054358

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This Festschrift comprises a series of papers written in honour of the philologist Andreas Fischer, on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday. As in Andreas Fischer's own research, the main focus of the volume is on words: words in modern varieties, such as emergent conjunctions in Australian, American and British English, words in their cultural and historical context, such as English keywords in Old Norse literature, and words in a diachronic perspective, such as Romance suffixation in the history of English. Many contributions are anchored in the philological tradition that has informed much of Andreas Fischer's own scholarship, such as the study of verbal duelling in the late thirteenth-century romance Kyng Alisaunder. Others examine the construction ofdiscourses, such as those surrounding the Black Death. The volume, with its innovative studies,offers fascinating insights into words, discourses,and their contexts, both past and present.


Corpus Linguistics Beyond the Word

Corpus Linguistics Beyond the Word

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2015-07-14

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 9401203849

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This volume will be of particular interest to readers interested in expanding the applications of corpus linguistics techniques through new tools and approaches. The text includes selected papers from the Fifth North American Symposium, hosted by the Linguistics Department at Montclair State University in Montclair New Jersey in May 2004. The symposium papers represented several areas of corpus studies including language development, syntactic analysis, pragmatics and discourse, language change, register variation, corpus creation and annotation, and practical applications of corpus work, primarily in language teaching, but also in medical training and machine translation. A common thread through most of the papers was the use of corpora to study domains longer than the word. Not surprisingly, fully half of the papers deal with the computational tools and linguistic strategies needed to search for and analyze these longer spans of language while most of the remaining papers examine particular syntactic and rhetorical properties of one or more corpora.


Reading the Runes in Old English and Old Norse Poetry

Reading the Runes in Old English and Old Norse Poetry

Author: Thomas Birkett

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-03-27

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1317070992

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Reading the Runes in Old English and Old Norse Poetry is the first book-length study to compare responses to runic heritage in the literature of Anglo-Saxon England and medieval Iceland. The Anglo-Saxon runic script had already become the preserve of antiquarians at the time the majority of Old English poetry was written down, and the Icelanders recording the mythology associated with the script were at some remove from the centres of runic practice in medieval Scandinavia. Both literary cultures thus inherited knowledge of the runic system and the traditions associated with it, but viewed this literate past from the vantage point of a developed manuscript culture. There has, as yet, been no comprehensive study of poetic responses to this scriptural heritage, which include episodes in such canonical texts as Beowulf, the Old English riddles and the poems of the Poetic Edda. By analysing the inflection of the script through shared literary traditions, this study enhances our understanding of the burgeoning of literary self-awareness in early medieval vernacular poetry and the construction of cultural memory, and furthers our understanding of the relationship between Anglo-Saxon and Norse textual cultures. The introduction sets out in detail the rationale for examining runes in poetry as a literary motif and surveys the relevant critical debates. The body of the volume is comprised of five linked case studies of runes in poetry, viewing these representations through the paradigm of scriptural reconstruction and the validation of contemporary literary, historical and religious sensibilities.


Words, Words, Words

Words, Words, Words

Author: David Crystal

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0199210772

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Words, Words, Words is all about the wonder of words. Drawing on a lifetime's experience, David Crystal explores language in all its rich varieties through words: the very building blocks of our communication. Language has no life of its own: it only exists in the mouths and ears, hands, eyes and brains of its users. As we are guided expertly and passionately through the mysteries and delights of word origins, histories, spellings, regional and social variations, taboo words, jargon, and wordplay, the contribution we all play in shaping the linguistic world around us becomes evident. Words, Words, Words is a celebration of what we say and how we say it. It invites us to engage linguistically with who we are: to understand what words tell us about where we come from and what we do. And as they continually shape our lives, it suggests ways that we can look at words anew and get involved with collecting and coining words ourselves.


Contemporary Applied Linguistics Volume 1

Contemporary Applied Linguistics Volume 1

Author: Vivian Cook

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2009-06-23

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 144116717X

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Written by internationally renowned academics, this volume provides a snapshot of the field of applied linguistics, and illustrates how linguistics is informing and engaging with neighbouring disciplines. The contributors present new research in the 'traditional' areas of applied linguistics, including multilingualism, language education, teacher-learner relationships, and assessment. It represents the best of current practice in applied linguistics, and will be invaluable to students and researchers looking for an overview of the field.


The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics

The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics

Author: Douglas Biber

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-06-25

Total Pages: 757

ISBN-13: 1316298701

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The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics (CHECL) surveys the breadth of corpus-based linguistic research on English, including chapters on collocations, phraseology, grammatical variation, historical change, and the description of registers and dialects. The most innovative aspects of the CHECL are its emphasis on critical discussion, its explicit evaluation of the state of the art in each sub-discipline, and the inclusion of empirical case studies. While each chapter includes a broad survey of previous research, the primary focus is on a detailed description of the most important corpus-based studies in this area, with discussion of what those studies found, and why they are important. Each chapter also includes a critical discussion of the corpus-based methods employed for research in this area, as well as an explicit summary of new findings and discoveries.


The Languages and Linguistics of Indigenous North America

The Languages and Linguistics of Indigenous North America

Author: Carmen Dagostino

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2023-12-18

Total Pages: 998

ISBN-13: 3110712741

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This handbook provides broad coverage of the languages indigenous to North America, with special focus on typologically interesting features and areal characteristics, surveys of current work, and topics of particular importance to communities. The volume is divided into two major parts: subfields of linguistics and family sketches. The subfields include those that are customarily addressed in discussions of North American languages (sounds and sound structure, words, sentences), as well as many that have received somewhat less attention until recently (tone, prosody, sociolinguistic variation, directives, information structure, discourse, meaning, language over space and time, conversation structure, evidentiality, pragmatics, verbal art, first and second language acquisition, archives, evolving notions of fieldwork). Family sketches cover major language families and isolates and highlight topics of special value to communities engaged in work on language maintenance, documentation, and revitalization.


Words on the Move

Words on the Move

Author: John McWhorter

Publisher: Henry Holt and Company

Published: 2016-09-06

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1627794735

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A bestselling linguist takes us on a lively tour of how the English language is evolving before our eyes -- and why we should embrace this transformation and not fight it Language is always changing -- but we tend not to like it. We understand that new words must be created for new things, but the way English is spoken today rubs many of us the wrong way. Whether it’s the use of literally to mean “figuratively” rather than “by the letter,” or the way young people use LOL and like, or business jargon like What’s the ask? -- it often seems as if the language is deteriorating before our eyes. But the truth is different and a lot less scary, as John McWhorter shows in this delightful and eye-opening exploration of how English has always been in motion and continues to evolve today. Drawing examples from everyday life and employing a generous helping of humor, he shows that these shifts are a natural process common to all languages, and that we should embrace and appreciate these changes, not condemn them. Words on the Move opens our eyes to the surprising backstories to the words and expressions we use every day. Did you know that silly once meant “blessed”? Or that ought was the original past tense of owe? Or that the suffix -ly in adverbs is actually a remnant of the word like? And have you ever wondered why some people from New Orleans sound as if they come from Brooklyn? McWhorter encourages us to marvel at the dynamism and resilience of the English language, and his book offers a lively journey through which we discover that words are ever on the move and our lives are all the richer for it.