Describing Language

Download or read book Describing Language written by David Graddol and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Vague Language written by Joanna Channell and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1994 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a major descriptive study of linguistic vagueness. It argues that strategies for being vague constitute a key aspect of the communicative competence of the native speaker of English.

Download or read book Describing Spoken English written by Charles W. Kreidler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-03-11 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describing Spoken English provides a practical and descriptive introduction to the pronunciation of contemporary English. It presumes no prior knowledge of phonetics and phonology. Charles Kreidler describes the principal varieties of English in the world today. Whilst concentrating on the phonological elements they share, the author sets out specific differences as minor variations on a theme. Although theoretically orientated towards generative phonology, theory is minimal and the book is clear, comprehensive and accessible to undergraduate and postgraduate students of linguistics and English Language. Numerous exercises are included to encourage further study.

Download or read book Catching Language written by Felix K. Ameka and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-08-22 with total page 671 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Descriptive grammars are our main vehicle for documenting and analysing the linguistic structure of the world's 6,000 languages. They bring together, in one place, a coherent treatment of how the whole language works, and therefore form the primary source of information on a given language, consulted by a wide range of users: areal specialists, typologists, theoreticians of any part of language (syntax, morphology, phonology, historical linguistics etc.), and members of the speech communities concerned. The writing of a descriptive grammar is a major intellectual challenge, that calls on the grammarian to balance a respect for the language's distinctive genius with an awareness of how other languages work, to combine rigour with readability, to depict structural regularities while respecting a corpus of real material, and to represent something of the native speaker's competence while recognising the variation inherent in any speech community. Despite a recent surge of awareness of the need to document little-known languages, there is no book that focusses on the manifold issues that face the author of a descriptive grammar. This volume brings together contributors who approach the problem from a range of angles. Most have written descriptive grammars themselves, but others represent different types of reader. Among the topics they address are: overall issues of grammar design, the complementary roles of outsider and native speaker grammarians, the balance between grammar and lexicon, cross-linguistic comparability, the role of explanation in grammatical description, the interplay of theory and a range of fieldwork methods in language description, the challenges of describing languages in their cultural and historical context, and the tensions between linguistic particularity, established practice of particular schools of linguistic description and the need for a universally commensurable analytic framework. This book will renew the field of grammaticography, addressing a multiple readership of descriptive linguists, typologists, and formal linguists, by bringing together a range of distinguished practitioners from around the world to address these questions.

Download or read book Studying and Describing Unwritten Languages written by Luc Bouquiaux and published by Sil International, Global Publishing. This book was released on 1992 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A one-volume English translation of a three-volume French work with techniques for gathering and processing data from unwritten languages.

Download or read book An Introduction to the Nature and Functions of Language written by Howard Jackson and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-01-27 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: >

Download or read book Whose Language? written by Jacob Mey and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1985-01-01 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "For the colonized person, objectivity is always directed against him" (Frantz Fanon). Colonized persons do not live on what we call (or used to call) the "colonies" alone. In general, objective reality, or the "facts of life", are very different depending on the kind of life you can afford. This goes for language as well; and it explains both the title of this book, and gives it its "raison d'être". It deals with power in language, and asks: Who is really in command when we use "our" language? And why does it make sense to talk about a language of power (or lack of it)? The powerful are the colonizers, the colonized are the powerless, in language as in geopolitics. Colonizers and colonized alike, however, are subject to the social and economic conditions prevailing in society and therefore, a thorough analysis of these conditions is a must for any socially-oriented theory of language use.