This comprehensive collection of current research in the development of speech perception and perceptual learning documents the striking changes that take place both in early childhood and throughout life and speculates about the mechanisms responsible for those changes. The findings reported from this rich and active field address the role of growing linguistic knowledge and experience and demonstrate that speech perception develops in a bidirectional interplay with several levels of linguistic structure and cognitive processes.
This book examines the relationship between the White House, in the person of its press secretary, and the press corps through a linguistic analysis of the language used by both sides. A corpus was compiled of around fifty press briefings from the late Clinton years. A wide range of topics are discussed from the Kosovo crisis to the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. This work is highly original in demonstrating how concordance technology and the detailed linguistic evidence available in corpora can be used to study discourse features of text and the communicative strategies of speakers. It will be of vital interest to all linguists interested in corpus-based linguistics and pragmatics, as well as sociolinguists and students and scholars of communications, politics and the media.
This volume is a comprehensive general reference work for students, scholars, and general readers on forms (e.g., Ballad, Folktale, Legend) and methods of inquiry and analysis (e.g., Fieldwork, Historic-Geographic Method, Linguistic Approach) relevant to the study of folklore.
This book addresses a central problem in phraseological and linguistic analysis. The creative structure and the creative use of idioms. Let me therefore start creatively, with a highly speculative metaphorical hypothesis: idioms are to linguists and language users what the Cheshire cat is to Alice. Idioms are peculiar linguistic constructions that have raised many eyebrows in linguistics and often confuse newcomers to a language. Indeed, the expression grin like a Cheshire cat is an idiom. More precisely, it is an idiomatic comparison whose motivation has become opaque: as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) indicates, the phrase is of undetermined origin.