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Writing is crucial to the academic world. It is the main mode of communication among scientists and scholars and also a means for students for obtaining their degrees. The papers in this volume highlight the intercultural, generic and textual complexities of academic writing. Comparisons are made between various traditions of academic writing in different cultures and contexts and the studies combine linguistic analyses with analyses of the social settings in which academic writing takes place and is acquired. The common denominator for the papers is writing in English and attention is given to native-English writers' and non-native writers' problems in different disciplines. The articles in the book introduce a variety of methodological approaches for analyses and search for better teaching methods and ways of improving the syllabi of writing curricula. The book as a whole illustrates how linguists strive for new research methods and practical applications in applied linguistics.
English as a lingua franca has become a hot topic in Applied Linguistics and English Studies. While it has been a subject of controversy for some time, linguistic observations on actual use have largely been missing out of the debate. This is now changing fast, and the study of English as a lingua franca has become a vibrant research field. This book reflects achievements in the growing field; it presents a good selection of empirical findings, thus providing substance to arguments. It comprises contributions from pioneers and established scholars in the field, along with reports from substantial ongoing research projects. The papers offer insights into the workings of English as a lingua fr...
This book explores the emerging area of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in academic settings. The emergence and recognition of English used as a Lingua Franca (ELF) offers new opportunities for investigating language change and language contact. This volume explores the use of English in an academic context and between speakers from a range of language backgrounds, and is the only book to date to present spoken academic English from a non-native speaker perspective. Data examined from the one-million-word English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings (ELFA) corpus provides an in-depth account of how speakers use and shape the language through dialogue in intellectually and verbally demanding situations. Available separately as a hardback.
Through integrating different perspectives on language change, this book explores the enormous on-going linguistic upheavals in the wake of the global dominance of English. Combining empirical research with theoretical approaches, it will appeal to researchers and graduate students of English, and also of other languages studying language change.
Academic writing is rhetorical and culturally conditioned. What in one culture appears as effective and proper, can in a new cultural context look like chaotic writing and sloppy thinking. To discover the ways in which such impressions are made, we need careful textual analysis of academic writing in different cultural contexts. This book takes a textlinguistic approach and contrasts academic journal articles in a large and dominant culture (Anglo-American), a small and peripheral one (Finnish), and the intercultural products of the small culture members writing in the dominant language (Finns in English). The results indicate that academics do have culture-specific writing styles, and that textlinguistic tools are crucial if we want to expand our understanding of written communication.
Translation universals is one of the most intriguing and controversial topics in recent translation studies. Can we discover general laws of translation, independent of the particularities of individual translations? Research into this is new: serious empirical work only began in the late nineties. The present volume offers the state of the art on the issue. It includes theoretical discussion on alternative conceptualisations and new distinctions around the basic concepts. Several papers test hypotheses on universals in the light of recent work in different languages, and some suggest new ones emerging from empirical work over the last two to three years. The book contributes to the search for generalities in translation, the methodological solutions available, and presents emerging evidence on the kinds of regularities that large-scale research is bringing forth. On a more practical level, the applicability of the hypotheses and findings to translator education is, as always, a concern for translation studies.
People have a natural propensity to understand language text as a succession of smallish chunks, whether they are reading, writing, speaking or listening. Linguists have found that this propensity can shed light on the nature and structure of language, and there are many studies which attempt to harness the potential of natural chunking.This book explores the role of chunking in the description of discourse, especially spoken discourse. It appears that chunking offers a sound but flexible platform on which can be built a descriptive model which is more open and comprehensive than more familiar approaches to structural description. The model remains linear, in that it avoids hierarchies, and it concentrates on the combinatorial patterns of text. The linear approach turns out to have many advantages, bringing together under one descriptive method a wide variety of different styles of speech and writing. It is complementary to established grammars, but it raises pertinent questions about many of their assumptions.
In this book, a solid and emerging group of international researchers contributes to the theory of metadiscourse and to our understanding of the role metadiscourse and related ‘meta’ phenomena may play in digital forms of communication. Providing examples of new research methods and approaches, the authors investigate progressively hybridized academic and non-academic genres that have migrated from analogue to digital format. The book offers valuable insights on how digital communication has changed today’s communication environments and provides examples of research methods needed to capture that change. This volume will be appreciated by scholars and graduate students interested in linguistics, corpus linguistics and metadiscourse.
Most societies in today's world are multilingual. 'Language contact' occurs when speakers of different languages interact and their languages influence each other. This book is an introduction to the subject, covering individual and societal multilingualism, the acquisition of two or more languages from birth, second language acquisition in adulthood, language change, linguistic typology, language processing and the structure of the language faculty. It explains the effects of multilingualism on society and language policy, as well as the consequences that long-term bilingualism within communities can have for the structure of languages. Drawing on the author's own first-hand observations of child and adult bilingualism, the book provides a clear analysis of such phenomena as language convergence, grammatical borrowing, and mixed languages.
To go beyond the work of a leading intellectual is rarely an unambiguous tribute. However, when Gideon Toury founded Descriptive Translation Studies as a research-based discipline, he laid down precisely that intellectual challenge: not just to describe translation, but to explain it through reference to wider relations. That call offers at once a common base, an open and multidirectional ambition, and many good reasons for unambiguous tribute. The authors brought together in this volume include key players in Translation Studies who have responded to Toury's challenge in one way or another. Their diverse contributions address issues such as the sociology of translators, contemporary changes in intercultural relations, the fundamental problem of defining translations, the nature of explanation, and case studies including pseudotranslation in Renaissance Italy, Sherlock Holmes in Turkey, and the coffee-and-sugar economy in Brazil. All acknowledge Translation Studies as a research-based space for conceptual coherence and creativity; all seek to explain as well as describe. In this sense, we believe that Toury's call has been answered beyond expectations.