Added by: Maria | Karma: 3098.81 | Coursebooks | 4 August 2007
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Swearing is an everyday part of the language of most speakers of modern English. This corpus informed account of swearing describes swearing and also outlines its social function, with a particular focus on the relationship between swearing and abuse. A major theme of the book is the extension and application of corpus linguistics in the context of relevant analytical and theoretical models from linguistics, psychology and sociology.
A general introduction to the area of theoretical linguistics known as cognitive linguistics, this textbook provides up-to-date coverage of all areas of the field, including recent developments within cognitive semantics (such as Primary Metaphor Theory, Conceptual Blending Theory, and Principled Polysemy), and cognitive approaches to grammar (such as Radical Construction Grammar and Embodied Construction Grammar). The authors offer clear critical evaluations of competing formal approaches within theoretical linguistics.
For the past forty years, linguistics has been dominated by the idea that language is categorical and linguistic competence discrete. It has become increasingly clear, however, that many levels of representation, from phonemes to sentence structure, show probabilistic properties, as does the language faculty. Probabilistic linguistics conceptualizes categories as distributions and views knowledge of language not as a minimal set of categorical constraints but as a set of gradient rules that may be characterized by a statistical distribution. Whereas categorical approaches focus on the endpoints of distributions of linguistic phenomena, probabilistic approaches focus on the gradient middle ground. Probabilistic linguistics integrates all the progress made by linguistics thus far with a probabilistic perspective. This book presents a comprehensive introduction to probabilistic approaches to linguistic inquiry. It covers the application of probabilistic techniques to phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, historical linguistics, and sociolinguistics. It also includes a tutorial on elementary probability theory and probabilistic grammars.
Ellipsis and Nonsentential Speech (Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy) The papers in this volume address two main topics: Q1: What is the nature, and especially the scope, of ellipsis in natural language? Q2: What are the linguistic/philosophical implications of what one takes the nature/scope of ellipsis to be? Each of these main topics includes a large sub-part that deals specifically with nonsentential speech. Within the first main topic, Q1, there arises the sub-issue of whether nonsentential speech falls within the scope of ellipsis or not; within the second main topic, Q2, there arises the sub-issue of what linguistic/philosophical implications follow, if nonsentential speech does/does not count as ellipsis. * This book is unique in that it offers the reader; o Papers on the boundary between philosophy and linguistics, o Applications of advanced work in theoretical linguistics to traditional philosophical questions, o It is the only volume of papers ever published on sub-sentential speech, o Major contribution to our understanding of ellipsis in natural language, presently a central topic in syntactic theory. * This book is of interest to professionals and advanced graduate students in the fields of philosophy of language, semantics, and syntax.
An introduction to linguistics
A clear, straightforward guide to the rudiments of linguistics, aimed at A-level and undergraduate students. Explains the technical features, and leads to a full understanding, providing the sound base needed for exploring other branches of the field.
