Download or read book The Cognitive Foundation of Post colonial Englishes written by Thomas Hoffmann and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-09 with total page 101 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Varieties of English are spoken all over the world from Africa to Asia, from Europe to America. In addition to its use as a foreign language, English in many of these countries is a first or second language variety that initially arose in a colonial setting. Currently, the most influential sociolinguistic model for the evolution of these 'Post-Colonial Englishes' is the Dynamic Model. In this Element, I outline how Construction Grammar, the most prominent cognitive syntactic theory, can provide a cognitive foundation for the assumptions made by the Dynamic Model. As I shall argue, Construction Grammar naturally complements the Dynamic Model and, in addition to that, a 'Constructionist Grammar Approach to the Dynamic Model' approach generates new research questions concerning the productivity of syntactic patterns across Dynamic Model phases.

Download or read book Postcolonial English written by Edgar W. Schneider and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-05-17 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The global spread of English has resulted in the emergence of a diverse range of postcolonial varieties around the world. Postcolonial English provides a clear and original account of the evolution of these varieties, exploring the historical, social and ecological factors that have shaped all levels of their structure. It argues that while these Englishes have developed new and unique properties which differ greatly from one location to another, their spread and diversification can in fact be explained by a single underlying process, which builds upon the constant relationships and communication needs of the colonizers, the colonized, and other parties. Outlining the stages and characteristics of this process, it applies them in detail to English in sixteen different countries across all continents as well as, in a separate chapter, to a history of American English. Of key interest to sociolinguists, dialectologists, historical linguists and syntacticians alike, this book provides a fascinating new picture of the growth and evolution of English around the globe.

Download or read book Moving Beyond the Pandemic English and American Studies in Spain written by Aitor Ibarrola Armendáriz and published by Ed. Universidad de Cantabria. This book was released on 2022-11-11 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Moving beyond the Pandemic: English and American Studies in Spain" contains the Proceedings of the 44th AEDEAN (Asociación española de estudios anglo-norteamericanos) Conference held in November, 2021 at the University of Cantabria, Spain. The volume is structured into four different sections: “Plenary Speakers”, “Language and Linguistics”, “Literature and Culture” and “Round Tables”. The “Plenary Speakers” section includes papers written by two outstanding figures in the fields of Western Studies and Film Studies, respectively: Neil Campbell’s “An Inventory of Echoes”: Worlding the Western in Trump Era Fiction and Celestino Deleyto’s Transnational Stars and the Idea of Europe: Marion Cotillard, Diane Kruger. The “Language and Linguistics” section includes eleven papers that tackle a variety of issues concerning synchronic and diachronic phenomena in the English language of either native or non-native speakers at the phonetic, lexical, or grammatical level. These studies are indicative of the various current methodological approaches to research in subfields such as language teaching, contrastive linguistics, language contact or language variation, to name but a few. The “Literature and Culture Studies” section contains nineteen papers on topics as diverse as the field itself, ranging from Irish, Canadian, South African, Australian, American or English Literature to Film, Television and Cultural Studies. Finally, the “Round Tables” section comprises four round tables on Literature, Music, Film and Cultural Studies. The contributions included in this volume are a representative and significant sample of the quality of the research being carried out at present in Spanish Universities in the fields of English and American Studies, and are solid evidence that our field is moving beyond the pandemic and is in excellent health.

Download or read book Indian Englishes in the Twenty First Century written by Sven Leuckert and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-30 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: English fulfils important intra- and international functions in 21st century India. However, the country's size in terms of area, population, and linguistic diversity means that completely uniform developments in Indian English (IndE) are unlikely. Using sophisticated corpus-linguistic and statistical methods, this Element explores the unity and diversity of IndE by providing studies of selected lexical and morphosyntactic features that characterise Indian English(es) in the 21st century. The findings indicate a degree of incipient 'supralocalisation', i.e. a spread of features beyond their place of origin, cutting through the typological Indo-Aryan vs. Dravidian divide.

Download or read book Construction Grammar written by Thomas Hoffmann and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-28 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive cognitive account of English morphology and syntax that covers topics such as language acquisition and variation and change.

Download or read book Inheritance and Innovation in the Evolution of Rural African American English written by Guy Bailey and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-06 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Element uses data from the Springville Project to explore how the functions of the inherited forms invariant be (from English sources) and zero (from creolization) have transformed during the twentieth century. Originally just alternative present tense copula/auxiliary forms, both features developed into aspectual markers – invariant be to mark durativity/habituality and zero to mark nonstativity. The motivation for these innovations were both socio-cultural and linguistic. The Great Migration and its consequences provided a demographic and socio-cultural context within which linguistic innovations could develop and spread. The mismatch between form and function within the present tense copula/auxiliary system and the grammatical ambiguities that affected both invariant be and zero provided linguistic triggers for this reanalysis. When taken together, the evolution of these forms illustrates how restructured linguistic subsystems (and eventually new varieties) emerge out of the interplay between inheritance and innovation.

Download or read book The Constructicon written by Holger Diessel and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-06-30 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is one of the central claims of construction grammar that constructions are organized in some kind of network, commonly referred to as the constructicon. In the classical model of construction grammar, developed by Berkeley linguists in the 1990s, the constructicon is an inheritance network of taxonomically related grammatical patterns. However, recent research in usage-based linguistics has expanded the classical inheritance model into a multidimensional network approach in which constructions are interrelated by multiple types of associations. The multidimensional network approach challenges longstanding assumptions of linguistic research and calls for a reorganization of the constructivist approach. This Element describes how the conception of the constructicon has changed in recent years and elaborates on some central claims of the multidimensional network approach.

Download or read book Copilots for Linguists written by Tiago Timponi Torrent and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-31 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AI can assist the linguist in doing research on the structure of language. This Element illustrates this possibility by showing how a conversational AI based on a Large Language Model (AI LLM chatbot) can assist the Construction Grammarian, and especially the Frame Semanticist. An AI LLM chatbot is a text-generation system trained on vast amounts of text. To generate text, it must be able to find patterns in the data and mimic some linguistic capacity, at least in the eyes of a cooperative human user. The authors do not focus on whether AIs “understand” language. Rather, they investigate whether AI LLM chatbots are useful tools for linguists. They reframe the discussion from what AI LLM chatbots can do with language to what they can do for linguists. They find that a chatty LLM can labor usefully as an eliciting interlocutor, and present precise, scripted routines for prompting conversational LLMs.

Download or read book Can Construction Grammar Be Proven Wrong written by Bert Cappelle and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-31 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Construction Grammar has gained prominence in linguistics, owing its popularity to its inclusive approach that considers language units of varying sizes and generality as potential constructions – mentally stored form-function units. This Element serves as a cautionary note against complacency and dogmatism. It emphasizes the enduring importance of falsifiability as a criterion for scientific hypotheses and theories. Can every postulated construction, in principle, be empirically demonstrated not to exist? As a case study, the author examines the schematic English transitive verb-particle construction, which defies experimental verification. He argues that we can still reject its non-existence using sound linguistic reasoning. But beyond individual constructions, what could be a crucial test for Construction Grammar itself, one that would falsify it as a theory? In making a proposal for such a test, designed to prove that speakers also exhibit pure-form knowledge, this Element contributes to ongoing discussions about Construction Grammar's theoretical foundations.

Download or read book Language Ideologies and Identities on Facebook and TikTok written by Guyanne Wilson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-06 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph examines the ways in which Caribbean content creators use elements of Caribbean Englishes and Creoles in their performances of identity in image macro memes and TikTok videos. It also examines the ideologies that underlie these performances. The data comprises memes from Trinidadian Facebook pages, as well as videos by Guyanese, Barbadian, and Trinidadian TikTokers, and was analysed using the multimodal method designed by Kress. For meme makers, identity is understood as a system of distinction between ingroups and outgroups, and language and other semiotic features, notably emojis, are used to distinguish Trinidadians from other nationalities, and groups of Trinidadians from one another. TikTokers establish their Caribbean identity primarily through knowledge of lexis, but this works in concert with other linguistic features to create authentic identities. Social media content is underpinned by the tension between the acceptance and rejection of standard language ideologies.

Download or read book Modelling World Englishes written by Buschfeld Sarah Buschfeld and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-09 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together two types of varieties of English that have so far been treated separately: postcolonial and non-postcolonial Englishes. It examines these varieties of English against the backdrop of current World Englishes theory, with a special focus on the extra- and Intra-Territorial Forces (EIF) Model. Bringing together a range of distinguished researchers in the field, each chapter tests the validity of this new model, analyses a different variety of English and assesses it in relation to current models of World Englishes. In doing so, the book ends the long-standing conceptual gap between postcolonial and non-postcolonial Englishes and integrates these in a unified framework of World Englishes. Case studies examine English(es) in England, Namibia, the United Arab Emirates, India, Singapore, the Philippines, South Korea, Japan, Australia, North America, the Bahamans, Trinidad, Tristan da Cunha, St. Helena, Bermuda, and the Falkland Islands, Ireland, Gibraltar and Ghana.

Download or read book Cognitive Pragmatics written by Hans-Jörg Schmid and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-08-31 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Speakers tend to compose their utterances in such a way that the message they want to get across is hardly ever fully encoded by the meanings of the words and the grammar they use. Instead speakers rely on hearers adding conceptual and emotive content while interpreting the contextually appropriate meanings and intentions behind utterances. This insight, which is of course particularly relevant in all kinds of indirect, figurative or humorous talk, lies at the heart of the linguistic discipline of pragmatics. If pragmatics is the study of meaning-in-context, then cognitive pragmatics can be broadly defined as encompassing the study of the cognitive principles and processes involved in the construal of meaning-in-context. While it would seem only natural that pragmatics as such should have addressed such cognitive issues anyway, it has mainly been due to the historical rooting of this discipline in the philosophy of language that psychological aspects have not been in the pragmatic limelight to date. Being part of the 9-volume-series Handbooks of Pragmatics, this volume is the first to systematically survey this terrain from a wide range of perspectives. It collects state-of-the-art contributions by leading experts from the fields of pragmatics, psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, clinical linguistics and historical linguistics. The volume is divided into four parts which tackle the following questions: Part I: The cognitive principles of pragmatic competence What are the general cognitive principles underlying pragmatic competence, i.e. the skill to arrive at context-dependent meanings of utterances? What are the cognitive underpinnings of language users' ability to compute or infer intended meanings in the role of hearers and to give hints as to how to decode intended meanings in the role of speakers? Part II: The psychology of pragmatics What are the actual cognitive processes taking place during online construal of meaning-in-context on the basis of encoded messages? How is pragmatic competence acquired in childhood? What are the types, sources and effects of pragmatic disorders, i.e. impairments of pragmatic competence? Part III: The construal of non-explicit and non-literal meaning-in-context What are the cognitive principles and processes involved in the construal of meanings of non-explicit and indirect utterances? How do we process figurative meanings, humour and gestures? Part IV: The emergence of linguistic structures from meaning-in-context What are the repercussions of the (repeated) construal of context-dependent meanings on linguistic structures and the linguistic system? How does the system change under the influence of the construal of meanings in social situations? Reduced series price (print) available! [email protected].

Download or read book Encyclopedia of Post Colonial Literatures in English written by Eugene Benson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2005 with total page 1946 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Post-Colonial Literatures in English, together with English Literature and American Literature, form one of the three major groupings of literature in English, and, as such, are widely studied around the world. Their significance derives from the richness and variety of experience which they reflect. In three volumes, this Encyclopedia documents the history and development of this body of work and includes original research relating to the literatures of some 50 countries and territories. In more than 1,600 entries written by more than 600 internationally recognized scholars, it explores the effect of the colonial and post-colonial experience on literatures in English worldwide.

Download or read book Power in Language Culture Literature and Education written by Marta Degani and published by Narr Francke Attempto Verlag. This book was released on 2023-04-24 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In one of the contributions to this edited volume an interviewee argues that "English is power". For researchers in the field of English Studies this raises the questions of where the power of English resides and which types and practices of power are implied in the uses of English. Linguists, scholars of literature and culture, and language educators address aspects of these questions in a wide range of contributions. The book shows that the power of English can oscillate between empowerment and subjection, on the one hand enabling humans to develop manifold capabilities and on the other constraining their scope of action and reflection. In this edited volume, a case is made for self-critical English Studies to be dialogic, empowering and power-critical in approach.

Download or read book Postcolonial English written by Edgar Werner Schneider and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The global spread of English has resulted in the emergence of a diverse range of postcolonial varieties around the world. Postcolonial English provides a clear and original account of the evolution of these varieties, exploring the historical, social and ecological factors that have shaped all levels of their structure. It argues that while these Englishes have developed new and unique properties which differ greatly from one location to another, their spread and diversification can in fact be explained by a single underlying process, which builds upon the constant relationships and communication needs of the colonizers, the colonized, and other parties. Outlining the stages and characteristics of this process, it applies them in detail to English in sixteen different countries across all continents as well as, in a separate chapter, to a history of American English. Of key interest to sociolinguists, dialectologists, historical linguists and syntacticians alike, this book provides a fascinating new picture of the growth and evolution of English around the globe.

Download or read book A Framework for Cognitive Sociolinguistics written by Francisco Moreno-Fernández and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Framework for Cognitive Sociolinguistics attempts to lay out the epistemological system for a cognitive sociolinguistics—the first book to do so in the English language. The intention of this volume is not to provide a simple catalog of sociolinguistic principles or of theoretical postulates of a cognitive nature, but rather it aims to build a verifiable metatheoretical basis for cognitive sociolinguistics. This book is articulated through a series of propositions, accompanied by annotations and commentaries that develop, qualify and exemplify these propositions. As for the research questions that would be central to a cognitive sociolinguistic endeavor, the following incomplete catalog could be enumerated: What do speakers know about their language? What do they know about communicative interaction? What do speakers know about sociolinguistic variation? Where does that knowledge reside and how is it configured? How does social reality influence the origin and processing of language? How does language use affect the configuration, evolution and variation of language? What do speakers know about their socio-communicative context? How do speakers perceive sociolinguistic reality? What are speakers’ attitudes and beliefs regarding linguistic variation? How does sociolinguistic perception influence speakers’ communicative behavior at all levels? How does language contribute to the construction of identity? Offering a fresh perspective on the frequently taught and studied topic of cognitive linguistics, A Framework for Cognitive Sociolinguistics can easily be incorporated into existing courses in the areas of both cognitive and sociocultural linguistics.

Download or read book The Language of Postcolonial Literatures written by Ismail S. Talib and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring literatures from a range of countries this book provides a comprehensive introduction to some of the central features of language in a wide variety of postcolonial texts.