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This book, by an international group of scholars, focuses on a number of sociolinguistic issues, some of them complex and controversial, linked to language education in the age of globalisation. It examines these in different contexts of immigration and super-diversity, in the light of new mobilities and new conceptualisations of changing social realities and language communities. The various investigations presented in the volume are often united and interconnected in their approaches to these key areas of focus, although each peer-edited chapter brings its own relevance to the work as a whole, and each reflects the complexities and practices of the particular contexts and speech communitie...
The present is a time of major change in the world of higher education. Conceptions of knowledge and learning as well as course provision are being powerfully altered by current socio-political agendas, constantly evolving technology, demographic developments. The question of identity and its construction in narrative are central to reflection on these issues. Indeed the construction of multimodal/hybridized narratives involves discoursal processes where perceptions of culture and identity, attitudinal and evaluative stances are represented, negotiated, marginalized, transformed. This volume presents a rich variety of perspectives on verbal/visual narrative texts in higher education coming from Europe, North America, South Africa, China and Australia. It includes case studies and original research from a wide spectrum of disciplinary domains (political science, law, medicine, biology, ICT, teacher education) set in a range of different education contexts (online communities and classrooms; native-speaker/nonnative-speaker, intercultural and multilingual/multiethnic milieus).
This book has been shortlisted for an ESSE book award 2012 in English Language and Linguistics, Junior Scholars. This volume approaches the analysis of variation in English from diachronic, diatopic, and contrastive/comparative perspectives. The individual case studies, all closely interrelated, are organized into three parts or sections. Part I (Diachronic Studies) applies a variationist methodology to the analysis of developments in the use of the courtesy marker please, adverbs in -ly, the s- genitive and a number of phrasal combinations with the verb get. It also examines Early Modern English regional dialect vocabulary. Part II (Diatopic Studies) is concerned with the analysis of severa...
This volume explores the relationship between shared disciplinary norms and individual traits in academic speech and writing. Despite the standardising pressure of cultural and language-related factors, academic communication remains in many ways a highly personal affair, with active participation in a disciplinary community requiring a multidimensional discourse that combines the professional, institutional, social and individual identities of its members. The first section of the volume deals with tensions involving individual/collective values and the analysis of collective vs. individual discoursal features in academic discourse. The second section comprises longitudinal investigations of the academic output of single scholars, so as to highlight the individuality in their choices and the reasons for not conforming with the commonality of conventions shared by their professional community. The third part deals with genres that are meant to impose commonality on the members of an academic community, not only in the drafting of specialized texts but also when these are reviewed or evaluated for possible publication.
The book provides in-depth analysis of the new perspectives on codifications, and of the related reforms, that give recognition to new ideas, new needs, and new techniques. The contributions from several jurisdictions collected in this book provide a much needed evaluation of the current impact of codification on the law and are a first, essential reference for assessing the importance of civil law codifications in the contemporary world.
The development from a synthetic to an analytic language is one of the most important topics in English historical syntax. This development is reflected in the gradual decrease of case-forms and the replacement of their functions with equivalent prepositional constructions. Focussing on the Old English period, when case-forms and prepositional constructions overlapped in various functions, this book aims to answer an unresolved question: was there a significant change in the use of case-forms and, alternatively, in the use of prepositions plus case-forms in contexts where both types were possible? The author makes a statistical comparison between prose texts written in the early Old English period and texts of the later Old English period; she also takes into account stylistic features of individual texts. Thus, this book addresses this Old English syntactic issue both from a historical and a stylistic perspective and shows the stages of development during the Old English period.
Based on original research and novel concepts, this book investigates the nature and use of terminology from linguistic and applied viewpoints. Throughout, problems with terminology, such as overuse by teachers and cases of synonymy and polysemy, are considered and solutions are offered. Part One looks firstly at some basic concepts, then draws important distinctions between pedagogic and scientific terminology, and between transparent, opaque and iconic terms, before examining the historical, lexical and grammatical nature of terms. Part Two attempts to estimate the value and relevance of terminology in language teaching and describes the use and knowledge of terminology in various language-teaching-related constituencies: learners, teachers, textbooks, grammars and research. It concludes with a discussion of the criteria for evaluating terms and an analysis of terms used in ELT.
Normative texts are meant to be highly impersonal and decontextualised, yet at the same time they also deal with a range of human behaviour that is difficult to predict, which means they have to have a very high degree of determinacy on the one hand, and all-inclusiveness on the other. This poses a dilemma for the writer and interpreter of normative texts. The author of such texts must be determinate and vague at the same time, depending upon to what extent he or she can predict every conceivable contingency that may arise in the application of what he or she writes. The papers in this volume discuss important legal and linguistic aspects relating to the use of vagueness in legal drafting and demonstrate why such aspects are critical to our understanding of the way normative texts function.
Aiming at exemplifying the methodology of learner corpus profiling, this book describes salient features of Romanian Learner English. As a starting point, the volume offers a comprehensive presentation of the Romanian-English contrastive studies. Another innovative aspect of the book refers to the use of the first Romanian Corpus of Learner English, whose compilation is the object of a methodological discussion. In one of the main chapters, the book introduces the methodology of learner corpus profiling and compares it with existing approaches. The profiling approach is emphasised by corpus-based quantitative and qualitative investigations of Romanian Learner English. Part of the investigation is dedicated to the lexico-grammatical profiles of articles, prepositions and genitives. The frequency-based collocation analyses are integrated with error analyses and extended into error pattern samples. Furthermore, contrasting typical Romanian Learner English constructions with examples from the German and the Italian learner corpora opens the path to new contrastive interlanguage analyses.
The volume presents a set of invited papers based on analyses of legal discourse drawn from a number of international contexts where often the English language and legal culture has had to adjust to legal concepts very different from those of the English law system. Many of the papers were inspired by two major projects on legal language and inter-multiculturality: Generic Integrity in Legislative Discourse in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts based in Hong Kong and carried out by an international team and Interculturality in Domain-specific English, a national project supported by the Italian Ministry for Education and Research, involving research units from five Italian universities