Bücher der Reihe Linguistic Insights

What does learning a language involve? Obviously, a rapid and definitive answer cannot be provided for this question since the aspects and situations affecting language learning are many and varied. From the role of culture to the use of new technologies in foreign language learning, this work aims to offer its readers some of the current research being carried out in different areas relevant to the topic. A long developing project has become reality thanks to the work of several researchers who are also experienced teaching professionals. In this sense, it is worth mentioning that most chapters of the book relate to different aspects of language learning within the classroom context which has resulted in realistic approaches to foreign language learning that can be of great help to those involved and/or interested in this field. Moreover, the clear division into sections allows readers to make their choice on how to proceed with the reading of the book depending on their thematic interests. Five sections make up this practical work: culture and language learning, human resources in language learning, language learning strategies, language learning software and language learning web resources.

The focus of this volume is on the business letter genre, a seminal and widely used genre in business communication. Since the introduction of the Internet, interest in this genre has increased once again, because of the digital format of the letter. E-mail has partially taken over the multiple functions of the traditional business letter and bypassed, again partially, the fax. However, the letter has also survived in its written form. Since the 1990s, genre theory has been receiving a lot of attention, both in academic and pedagogical circles. Discourse analysts have increasingly discovered the importance of the genre concept for the understanding of discourse. Not only do we get a better understanding of the linguistic characteristics (register, lexico-grammatical features) of texts, but we also become aware of their macrostructures which appear to be organised according to genre expectations and conventions rooted in the socio-cultural context. This evolution is also reflected in the different research approaches to the business letter, as shown by the various chapters of this volume.

Has the internet changed the nature of conducting controversies? This question cannot be answered easily as different forms of human interaction in an online environment exist and controversies in an online environment have not been analyzed from a linguistic point of view so far. On the other hand, there are many linguistic analyses of controversies in the Early Modern Period. First, this volume describes the communicative background of two online discussion forums dedicated to the study of historical arms and armor. Then, the volume analyzes the similarities and differences between Early Modern controversies and controversies in online internet discussion forums. Further, this book offers an accurate analysis of the strategies used in online discussion forums, analyzing two controversial threads taken from two online discussion forums and provides insights into the individual tactics and strategies applied in online controversies and highlights the similarities and differences of applied principles, norms, and rules. The book finally comments on stylistic choices used by participants in the controversies.

This book contains a collection of original research articles on lexicography written by prominent international scholars within the field. It aims at describing the state-of-the-art in lexicography at the beginning of the 21 century and at making proposals for future theoretical and practical work in the field. Theoretical lexicography currently has two competing theories: a contemplative theory focusing on the description of existing dictionaries on the basis of linguistic principles, and a function-based, transformative theory focusing on the dictionary and the user in order to develop new principles for dictionary research and dictionary making. Research in lexicography has now reached a crossroads and it is time to take stock of the present situation and try to identify the theories and principles that will set the agenda and point the direction for future lexicographic research and the production of printed and electronic dictionaries.

Current Trends in LSP Research

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at an international conference held in Bergamo (5-6 May 2000), which focussed on the semantic and pragmatic values of modality in specialized texts ¿ legal, economic, academic and medical. The assembled contributions give an overview of the range of scholarly approaches to modality. They convey the theoretical background and provide in-depth analyses of specialized texts on a synchronic as well as on a diachronic level.

The volume offers a collection of best practice European projects carried out in university contexts with the aim of highlighting the relevant role that Language Centres play in the field of language learning. A variety of project topics is described showing project coordinators' willingness of promoting cooperation which encourages a wide-angled multilingual and multicultural perspective.

This book explores the ways in which the use of English as a medium of instruction can contribute to a closer alignment between educational outcomes and the demands of the world of work in those contexts where English is used as a foreign language.

This book examines media representation of migrant workers in China. Drawing on discourse analysis and sociolinguistic theories, it investigates how identities of and stances towards migrant workers were constructed and mediated in media with a view to exploring the interrelationship between media representation and social change in China.

This volume comprises a selection of papers delivered at the Fourth ELC International Postgraduate Conference on Language and Cognition (ELC4). The eleven papers collected here pertain to different areas of linguistics as varied as diachronic linguistics, syntax, pragmatics or psycholinguistics.

This volume provides a shared context for surfacing deeply held beliefs and providing clearer pathways for closer understanding and adaptations to support integrated learning. The studies in each of the eight chapters are built on an in-depth critical review of research which enables the reader to carefully position the challenging questions posed.

This volume investigates the difficulties adult L2 users of English encounter with plosive consonants. It presents the results of two tasks examining the acquisition of plosive voicing contrasts by college students with CG backgrounds. These results are discussed in relation to the approaches of second language phonology and speech perception.

Catorce investigadores de diferentes países y nacionalidades, especialistas en diferentes campos de estudio sobre la lengua española ¿ Didáctica del ELE y del EFE, lengua de especialidad, lexicología, lingüística aplicada, terminología, traducción ¿, resaltan, al enfocar el léxico dentro de un contexto profesional y cultural específicos, la permeabilidad y renovación de la lengua española. Sus investigaciones inéditas que se enmarcan dentro de diversas perspectivas y áreas de investigación como la cibernética, la cognitiva, la didáctica, la estructuralista y la lingüística aplicada, abordan temas como los préstamos, las colocaciones sintácticas, la traducción, el léxico profesional y de especialidad, el discurso retórico de la prensa, el lenguaje del turismo, los enfoques didácticos sobre el léxico. El resultado de sus análisis de corpus muestra diferentes interpretaciones del léxico español dentro de los ámbitos arriba mencionados.

This book presents a comparative interdisciplinary socio-psycholinguistic study on plurilingual code-switching (CS) in Italy, Croatia and Scotland-UK, based on Italian in contact with four standard varieties (Spanish, English, Philipino and Croatian) and five non-standard varieties (Arbereshe, Occitan, Calabrese, Istrovenetian and Chakavski).

The aim of this book is to propose an original hypothesis to account for the difficulties associated with dyslexia, suggesting that this disorder is characterized by deficits affecting the subject's phonological and processing abilities. The results of four experimental protocols are discussed, providing further support for this hypothesis.

As a corpus-based typological cognitive study of English binominal quantitative expressions based on English-Chinese comparison, the book discovers functional equivalents of Chinese numeral classifiers in English, i.e. `Quasi-Numeral Classifiers' (QNCs) and unveils the categorisation process reflected by five cases of Dimensionality-based QNCs.

The focus of this book is to investigate interprofessional telephone interaction, a routine yet disruptive activity at the hospital, and to expose how nurses and physicians coordinate in view of delivering efficient patient care. The analysis of recorded calls at a Swiss hospital displays the variable formats through which nurses produce requests.

The book examines the linguistic varieties in the MS 133 Digby Mary Magdalene. It shows that most unusual forms are diatopic and diastratic alternatives used in specific religious contexts to realize well-defined sociolinguistic purposes.

The book explores how recent forms of resistance to European integration have affected the way in which the EU discursively represents itself to the public as a legitimate political entity. It detects the longitudinal evolution of the discursive strategies enacted by the EU in the field of communication policy to encourage popular endorsement.

This book gives an overview of telephone interpretation, a modality of remote interpretation that is becoming more and more popular for its benefits. It focusses on many of the aspects that shape this new modality of interpretation from a professional, innovative and pedagogical approach.

This book examines the English lingua-franca (ELF) uses in a corpus of online and scripted video-game interactions. While research generally explores the playful and technological aspects of computer-mediated communication, this study focuses on the strategies of cooperation, language simplification and authentication, lexical creativity and meaning negotiation that are generally activated within the community of practice of gamers to facilitate cross-cultural conversations. The scripted exchanges, instead, are examined by means of the ALFA Model (Analysis of Lingua Franca in Audiovisual texts), which is devised to enquire into the extent to which the non-native participants' language variations are part of the multimodal actualisation of the cognitive construct of non-native speakers, to which authors resort in order to prompt specific reactions on the part of the receivers. Finally, since the participants' turns in both online and scripted interactions are visually represented as written messages on screen, this research also contributes to the development of the description of written ELF variations, so far not thoroughly explored in the literature.

Through a selection of empirical studies anchored in analyses of authentic and contextualized language data, Taboo in Discourse explores the complex interplay between taboo and language in a range of social contexts, cultural settings and real-world discourse types from a broad and multidisciplinary perspective.

Using the Devil with Courtesy analyses Renaissance forms of (im)politeness through Shakespeare. Adopting a historical pragmatic perspective drawing in particular on Brown and Levinson (1987), Jucker (2010) and Culpeper (2011), the book focuses specifically on Hamlet (c. 1601) and The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1594).