Search results for "UIS"

Support for end-weight as a determinant of linguistic variation and change

2016

The term end-weight refers to the tendency for bulkier constituents to occur at the end of sentences. While end-weight has occasionally been analysed as a more general short-before-long principle in the sense of Behaghel's (1909–10) Law of Growing Constituents, the operation of end-weight in absolute sentence-final position has until recently lacked empirical verification. This article shows that end-weight effects can be observed in grammatical variation contexts in which language users have a choice between variants that differ in terms of length and degree of explicitness. Using two variation phenomena as a testing ground, we empirically investigate the hypothesis that the more explicit …

Relationship between students' opinions, background factors and learning outcomes: Finnish 9th graders learning English

2017

Tracing the indexicalization of the notion "Helsinki s"

2017

AbstractEarlier research has concluded that there is a strong symbolic relationship between Helsinki as a place and non-standard /s/ pronunciation. This phenomenon is likewise in continuous evidence in the Finnish media and social media. The notion of “Helsinki s” has become a folk linguistic fact although it lacks a clear linguistic correlate or even status as a linguistic fact. The only sibilant of the Finnish language is officially a voiceless alveolar, while the “Helsinki s” is most often discussed as “hissing”, “sharp” or “fronted”. However, according to recent research based on listening tasks, any /s/ may be designated and discussed as a “Helsinki s” if the speaker is regarded as a H…

One confession, multiple chronotopes: The interdiscursive authentication of an apology in an international criminal trial

2020

What genres tell us about evidentials and vice versa

2018

Abstract The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it aims to delve into the influence of contextual discursive factors in determining the type of evidential chosen and the pragmatic functions developed by evidentials in Spanish parliamentary discourse; second, it shows how evidentials can also provide useful new insight on the genre. A corpus study has been carried out studying the Spanish evidential discourse marker al parecer in parliamentary debates. The analysis shows how real examples of al parecer hardly fit any category of evidentials posited previously; data also illustrates how factors such as the discursive role or the part of the parliamentary process do affect the meaning of al …

deBot, K. (2015) A History of Applied Linguistics: From 1980 to the Present. New York: Routledge.154 pages. ISBN 978-1-1-138-82066-1

2016

Totally new and pretty awesome : Amplifier–adjective bigrams in GloWbE

2017

Abstract Previous work on adjectival intensification (e.g. very good , so glad , really great ) has mostly focussed on the adverbs in question, showing that different (native) varieties of English display distinctive preferences concerning intensifier choice. However, little is known so far about the role that intensifier-adjective units (bigrams) play. The present paper offers a first contribution to fill this research gap by focussing on a data-driven approach to (mostly) high-frequency bigrams and their collocational behaviour in the Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE). Asymmetric and symmetric measures are employed to establish attraction and repulsion between adverb and adjecti…

Twenty-first-century preschool bilingual education: facing advantages and challenges in cross-cultural contexts

2016

Early childhood is a critical period in a child’s intensive social, emotional, linguistic and cognitive development, and preschool serves as the first transitional step from home to the wider socia...

Pragmalinguistic Categories in Discourse Analysis of Science Journalism

2016

AbstractDrawing on selected approaches from pragmatics, functional linguistics, discourse space theories and evaluation theories, this article proposes a methodological framework for the study of science journalism. It presents the institutional context of science journalism, which is considered a hybrid discourse, as it combines features of science communication and of market-driven journalism, particularly the need for the coverage to meet the criteria of newsworthiness. To enable the study of how science journalists tend to engage the readers linguistically without foregoing the appearances of credibility, the article demonstrates the analytic potential of such pragmalinguistic categorie…

ΔP as a measure of collocation strength

2018

AbstractThis paper explores the proposed benefits of ΔP (delta P) as a measure of collocation strength. Its focus is on contrasting ΔP with other, more commonly used, association measures, particularly transitional probabilities, but also mutual information and Lexical Gravity G. To this end, first the strong correlation between ΔP and transitional probability is illustrated with the help of two exemplary corpora. This is followed by an analysis of hesitation placement in spontaneous spoken English, based on the assumption that hesitations will not be placed within strong collocations. Results show that, despite their strong similarity, in some contexts ΔP is more predictive of hesitation p…