Books » Reference

This ground-breaking work is a detailed account of an innovative and in-depth study of the attitudes of in excess of 500 Japanese learners towards a number of standard and non-standard as well as native and non-native varieties of English speech. The research conducted refines the investigation of learner attitudes by employing a range of pioneering techniques of attitude measurement. These methods are largely incorporated from the strong traditions that exist in the fields of social psychology and second language acquisition and utilize both direct and indirect techniques of attitude measurement. The author locates the findings in the context of the wealth of literature on native speaker evaluations of languages and language varieties. The study is unique in that the results provide clear evidence of both attitude change and high levels of linguistic awareness among the informants of social and geographical diversity within the English language. These findings are analyzed in detail in relation to the global spread of English as well as in terms of the pedagogical implications for the choice of linguistic model employed in English language classrooms both inside and outside Japan. The issues examined are of particular interest to educators, researchers and students in the fields of applied linguistics, TESOL, second language acquisition, social psychology of language and sociolinguistics. The pedagogical and language policy implications of the findings obtained make essential reading for those with a specific focus on the role of the English language and English language teaching, both in Japan and beyond.

The topic of variation in language has received considerable attention in the field of general linguistics in recent years. This includes research on linguistic micro-variation that is dependent on fine distinctions in syntax and information structure. However, relatively little work has been done on how this variation is acquired. This book focuses on how different types of variation are expressed in the input and how this is acquired by young children. The collection of papers includes studies of the acquisition of variation in a number of different languages, including English, German, Greek, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Swiss German, Ukrainian, and American Sign Language. Different kinds of linguistic variation are considered, ranging from pure word

This volume analyzes morphological and morphonological phenomena from a number of distinct Slavic languages. It does so in an innovative manner, yet also positions the analysis in the context of current morphological debates. It is thus a valuable contribution both to comparative Slavic morphology and general morphological theory. Moreover, the book is the first attempt at a theory of conversion and subtraction relevant to languages with rich inflectional morphology. It contributes to our structural understanding of the nature of word. As the first illustration of subtraction with examples from southern Slavic languages, it is an excellent source of specialist data. The books theoretical framework is easily accessible and applicable to other languages, which makes it attractive to researchers on Slavic languages and general linguists alike. The volume will also appeal to general morphologists, typologists, and advanced students in linguistics.

This introductory textbook in general phonetics was first published in 1976. It will be of use to all with an interest in the nature and working of the sound substance of human language, such as students of phonetics and linguistics, teachers and students of modern languages, speech therapists and audiologists. The emphasis is on the basics: the organs of speech and hearing, the methods of sound production in the vocal tract, the types of sound used in human languages, and the process of speech perception. The focus of attention is always the tongue and ear of the phonetician as an investigator of speech, rather than his instruments or experiments, with due attention paid to the phoneme and the distinctive feature, the units in that b

The relationship between the meaning of words and the structure of sentences is an important area of research in linguistics. Studying the connections between lexical conceptual meaning and event structural relations, this book arrives at a modular classification of verb types within English and across languages. Ramchand argues that lexical encyclopedic content and event structural aspects of meaning need to be systematically distinguished, and that thematic and aspectual relations belong to the latter domain of meaning. The book proposes a syntactic decompositional view of core verbal meaning, and sets out to account for the variability and systematicity of argument structure realisation across verb types. It also proposes an interesting view of lexical insertion.

What is the nature of syntactic structure Why do some languages have radically free word

This digital document is a journal article from Cognitive Psychology, published by Elsevier in 2005. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.Description: Infants parse speech into word-sized units according to biases that develop in the first year. One bias, present before the age of 7 months, is to cluster syllables that tend to co-occur. The present computational research demonstrates that this statistical clustering bias could lead to the extraction of speech sequences that are actual words, rather than missegmentations. In English and Dutch, these word-forms exhibit the strong-weak (trochaic) pattern that guides lexical segmentation after 8 months, suggesting that the trochaic parsing bias is learned as a generalization from statistically extracted bisyllables, and not via attention to short utterances or to high-frequency bisyllables. Extracted word-forms come from various syntactic classes, and exhibit distributional characteristics enabling rudimentary sorting of words into syntactic categories. The results highlight the importance of infants' first year in language learning: though they may know the meanings of very few words, infants are well on their way to building a vocabulary.

This digital document is a journal article from Journal of English for Academic Purposes, published by Elsevier in . The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.Description: This study investigated differences in vocabulary knowledge as a potential explanation for perceived differences between placed and promoted students in a university EAP reading course. Students in an advanced reading course (N=59) were tested on their vocabulary knowledge using the Vocabulary Levels Test Form B [Nation, I. S. P. (2001). Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press] at the beginning of the academic semester. Additionally, the promoted students' (n=29) vocabulary scores were compared to their own scores from the beginning of the intermediate course one semester earlier. Analysis of the data shows that students placed directly into the advanced reading course upon entry to the university have statistically significantly greater vocabulary knowledge than students promoted into the course after one semester of study in the EAP program. This difference was observed for both general as well as academic vocabulary knowledge. Moreover, promoted students' vocabulary scores showed no significant increase over their initial scores as intermediate students for either general or academic vocabulary knowledge despite the fact that they had taken one or more university content courses. Potential reasons for these results as well as curricular implications are discussed.

This digital document is a journal article from Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, published by Elsevier in . The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.Description: Using data provided by approximately 100 second graders each from Beijing, Hong Kong, Korea, and the United States, we investigated relations among phonological awareness, morphological structure awareness, vocabulary, and word recognition. Our results indicate that across languages, phonological awareness and morphological structure awareness are similarly associated with one another and with vocabulary knowledge; however, phonological awareness and morphological structure awareness have different associations with word recognition in different scripts among second graders. Specifically, phonological awareness may be more important for reading in English and Korean than for reading in Chinese. In contrast, morphological structure awareness may be more important for reading in Chinese and Korean than for reading in English at this grade level. l.

English is often regarded as one of the most difficult languages to master. Yet while the English language has a vocabulary of upwards of 500,000 words, it only uses nine parts of speech, and all of these words falls into one (or more) of those nine categories. Scientific English: A Guide for Scientists and Other Professionals, Third Edition contains many simple revelations like this that make effective scientific writing in English easy, even for those whose fluency in another language.The book is organized around a basic guide to English grammar that is specifically tailored to the needs of scientists, science writers, science educators, and science students. The authors explain the goals of scientific writing, the role of style, and the various kinds writing in the science, then provide a basic guide to the fundamentals of English and address problem areas such as redundancies, abbreviations and acronyms, jargon, and foreign terms. Email, online publishing, blogs, and writing for the Web are covered as well. This book is designed to be an enlightening and entertaining read that can then retained as a practical scientific writing reference guide.