Bücher der Reihe Linguistic Insights

This volume gives voice to the views and experiences of researchers, lecturers, administrative staff, teacher trainers and students with regard to the implementation of English-medium instruction in a public university based in the north-east of Italy.

The volume Learning second language pragmatics beyond traditional contexts is a collection of studies dealing with the acquisition of second language pragmatic competence in different learning contexts.

This volume explores knowledge dissemination practices according to two main orientations; first, with respect to the target audience, especially scholars vs. novices. Second in relation to the channels, especially multimodal and web-based platforms, and changing strategies such as popularization resources.

This book brings together contributions by a number of distinguished scholars that shed new light on current developments in this dynamic area of discourse analysis, especially taking into account recent research and emerging insights on speech communities and communities of practice.

Two complementary case studies are presented. First, a cross-varietal study indicates that high-contact varieties of English exhibit a higher attestation rate of pronoun omission than low-contact varieties. Second, a corpus-based study demonstrates that pronouns are commonly omitted in contexts in which their antecedents can be easily identified.

The advent of digital media has changed political communication. Populist movements are adept at using the affordances of new media.Digital media also make it easier than ever for the public to respond to politicians, or to launch their own initiatives.These changes are analysed across countries as diverse as Venezuela, USA, Pakistan and Romania.

Corrective feedback in traditional and technology-enhanced environments continues to be a controversial topic in the field of SLA. Through a discussion of theoretical, empirical, and pedagogical issues, this book contributes to the debate on the role of corrective feedback in second language development, with a focus on CALL environments.

The book showcases grammatical, pragmatic, and stylistic functions of punctuation, and shows how punctuation can encode emotion, metalinguistic marking, foregrounding and paralinguistic indications. It also highlights the sensibility of punctuation to genre and the speech-writing continuum, and shows how punctuation conventions change in time.

This book analyses European media discourses using a variety of tools, including appraisal analysis, argumentation theory, multimodal approaches and corpus linguistics, with various theoretical approaches, including SFL and corpus-informed discourse studies, critical discourse analysis, semio-communicative approaches, and Bakhtinian perspectives.

The volume fills a gap in the international debate on terminology and discourse by uncovering the new possibilities offered by analysing terms in authentic language environments. The contributions in the volume deal with research fields such as the analysis of variation and the synchronic and diachronic formation of terms, and popularization.

Reflects Minoji Akimoto's concern with studies of change in English that are theoretically-informed, but founded on substantial bodies of data. This volume contains a bibliography of Professor Akimoto's writings and an index of linguistic terms.

Offers a collection of papers which seek to provide further insights into the way scientific and technical knowledge is communicated nowadays in the academic sphere and also in society as a whole.

From International to Local English - And Back Again

EIL, ELF, Global English: Teaching and Learning Issues

Many of the world's 7000 documented language groups are endangered due to falling rates of language and culture transmission from one generation to the next. Some endangered language groups have been the focus of efforts to reverse patterns of linguistic and cultural loss, with variable success. This book presents case studies of endangered language groups from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Pacific (including Bisu, Iban, Iquito, Quechua, Wawa, Yi and sign languages) and of their associated knowledge and belief systems, to highlight the importance of preserving linguistic and cultural diversity. Issues of identity and pride emerge within the book, alongside discussion of language and culture policy.

Breaking Ground in Corpus-based Interpreting Studies

This volume is a collection of empirical studies investigating the ways and means through which culturally-shaped identities are manifested in and through discourse in documents and texts from multiple spheres of social action. It also looks at possible ways in which understanding and acceptance of diverse cultural identities can be moulded and developed through appropriate education. Language being one of the most evident and powerful 'markers' of cultural identity, discourse and text are sites where cultures are both constructed and displayed and where identities are negotiated. The approaches to the analysis of culture and identity adopted here to account for the multifaceted realisations of cultural identities in the texts and documents taken into consideration span from multimodality, to discourse and genre analysis, to corpus linguistics and text analysis. The volume then offers a varied picture of approaches to the scientific enquiry into the multifaceted manifestations of identity in and across national, professional, and disciplinary cultures.

Following the rationale that corpora have an important part to play in fostering language awareness, this monograph investigates the use of spoken corpora in the teaching of German as a foreign language. Corpus-based research has had an increasing influence on language teaching pedagogy, with regard to linguistic content as well as to teaching methodology. While the majority of studies reporting on corpus-based teaching approaches refer to English, only a small number of studies have discussed such an approach for German. In this study, the exploitation of language corpora is proposed in order to arrive at authentic teaching materials which facilitate the comprehension of German modal particles, which pose numerous problems for learners of German as a foreign language. The approach is twofold: first, the frequency of those word forms which may function as modal particles is established. Secondly, concordance data of the more frequently occurring particles are analysed qualitatively. Teaching materials based on these analyses are developed referring to patterns of use which can be relayed to language learners in order to provide them with tools for the decoding of particle meaning.

Pragmatic competence plays a key role in intercultural communication, particularly for students studying in a target community. This book investigates the effect of study abroad on second language learners' productive and receptive pragmatic competences, as well as their cognitive processes during speech act production. It employs a variety of research instruments, both quantitative and qualitative, to explore learners' pragmatic development over one year. The inclusion of a control group is a methodological strength of the longitudinal study, many such studies often not including a control group. In addition, the study longitudinally examines learners' cognitive processes during study abroad with innovative and insightful analyses. The book makes an important contribution to second language pragmatics with regard to developmental changes in both speech act production and perception during such processes.

This is a collection of research papers on competition in English affixation. The book presents diachronic and synchronic research both onomasiological and semasiological. The first three chapters review the literature and provide the theoretical framework for the experimental description of the remaining chapters.

The volume focuses on the languages of Anglophone films and television series and their dubbing into Italian. The chapters cover a rich range of topics including syntactic, lexical and sociolinguistic features of audiovisual dialogue, cross-linguistic contrasts, and the translation of culture specific references and multilingualism on screen.

The book brings together current research on the description of English using a range of corpora. It consists of a foreword, a review of the diachronic studies and another of the synchronic studies, twelve research papers, and a subject index. Five of the papers are about diachronic description and seven are about synchronic description.

Presents the research of an international group of scholars, engaged in the analysis of academic discourse from a genre-oriented perspective. This title provides examples of the complexity and flexibility of genres, which have shown to be subject to a continuous tension between stability and change as well as between convention and innovation.

Discourse and Identity in the Professions

Presents some of findings from a project on various aspects of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR). In this title, the chapters draws on discourse-based data to investigate extent to which 'integrity' of ADR principles is maintained in practice, and to what extent there is an increasing level of influence from litigative processes and procedures.

Deals with bilingual education in general, but it pays special attention to bilingual education in monolingual areas. This title aims to study effects of bilingual programmes during final stages of Primary and Secondary Education in contexts.

Questions of how to access and analyze the use of English as a global language are central to the study of the continuing spread of English as a vehicle of cross-cultural communication. The present book explores the relationship between the functions and forms of English as a Lingua Franca, and introduces the concept of Lingua Franca English to deal with the systematic differences between national native varieties of English and the non-native varieties which have developed relatively recently. The investigation of the sociolinguistic and linguistic processes involved in the development of Lingua Franca English focuses on Switzerland, and is carried out by means of a detailed comparative linguistic analysis of a large amount of data obtained from written and spoken English produced by Swiss speakers. The result is a detailed and critical description of current issues affecting the study of English as an international language, and a thorough investigation of the ongoing processes resulting from the interaction of Swiss people with different language backgrounds in shaping the nature of the English spoken in Switzerland. By examining the characteristics of English as it is used in Switzerland, light is shed on the diachronic problem of the focusing mechanisms involved in the growth of non-native varieties of English and processes of second language acquisition generally.

Develops a theoretical framework for the investigation of intuitions about stylistic differences from a contrastive point of view. This book gives an overview of scholarly approaches to writing and reading, genre studies, contrastive rhetoric and the notions of style and stylistics, together with an assessment of several individual approaches.