By Cambridge Extra, on May 16th, 2012 A blog by Andrew Goatly
To what extent is humour a liberating force? According to the theory advanced in Meaning and Humour, humour defeats expectations or introduces incongruities. And, linguistically speaking, this can be analysed as an overriding of lexical priming (Hoey), or as surprising foregrounding (Leech). For example, consider this joke:
“Give a man a fish–feed him for a day. Give a man two fish—feed him for two days”.
Internally the second sentence is not foregrounded—it is entirely predictable, to the point of near redundancy. Whereas externally, according to the expectations of this epigrammatic genre, where we anticipate something clever, unpredictable, entropic, the second sentence is foregrounded. The fact that most humour depends upon the overriding of lexical priming . . . → Read More: Meaning and Humour
By Cambridge Extra, on April 4th, 2012 by Neil Murray
When it comes to writing, academic disciplines – particularly those within the humanities and social sciences – have a good deal in common and, for the most part, they share very similar expectations of students’ writing.
However, despite such similarity, each discipline also tends to have its own particular set of conventions, its own way of doing things, and the fields of English language and linguistics are certainly no exception. The variation that can exist between the writing practices of different disciplines can leave students who are just starting out on course assignments or research projects uncertain about what exactly they should be doing and how. Although libraries or student services units will often produce guides to . . . → Read More: Writing Essays in English Language and Linguistics
By Cambridge Extra, on March 15th, 2012 Written by Professor James McGilvary
Many linguists and cognitive scientists resist Chomsky’s Minimalist Program. As there have been for the past 50 years, there are, of course, still those who object to Chomsky’s long-held nativist and internalist methodological assumptions, and these assumptions remain at the roots of Minimalism. But now with this advanced post-parameters program we find in addition resistance to one or more of the following: to the specific form of biolinguistics Chomsky adopts, to his view of the evolution of language, to the idea that the language system is (close to) perfect, to offering principled explanations, and to the very idea that linguistics should be studied by using the same methods as those employed by physicists and chemists . . . → Read More: Chomsky’s Science of Language
By Cambridge Extra, on March 12th, 2012 During a recent research project at UCL a number of motivated English teachers were invited to attend a series of ‘grammar days’ where they were provided with training in basic concepts of English grammar. The event highlighted the fact that only two out of the twenty attendees could recall being explicitly taught English grammar with a majority being self-taught. This re-affirmed the belief that teachers do not feel confident teaching English grammar.
What came out of the feedback discussions was that teachers need an accessible and enjoyable way to learn about grammar and to teach it to their students. Information technology had previously offered this opportunity in the form of the hugely popular ‘Internet Grammar of English’ which since its . . . → Read More: Grammar on the go
By Cambridge Extra, on February 23rd, 2012 Last year Vander Viana and Milena Mendes were involved in organising the 1st Interdisciplinary Linguistics Conference (1st ILinC) in Belfast.
They kindly agreed to answer some questions for Cambridge Extra:
What were the major challenges you faced in organising your first conference?
It goes without saying how challenging it is to organize a conference. Everyone who has done so is aware of the numerous tasks it involves as well as the attention required. In practical terms, conference organizers need to have a thorough knowledge of all aspects – from catering to the latest academic publications in the specific field the event focuses. And, most importantly, they need to be ready to deal with the most unusual situation of, for instance, . . . → Read More: Vander Viana and Milena Mendes discuss organising the 1st ILinC
By Cambridge Extra, on February 6th, 2012 Written by Stanley Dubinsky
In over two decades of teaching the science of language and basic linguistics to undergraduate college students, I have found that their appreciation for, and understanding of, the building blocks and structure of language can be greatly facilitated by using comic strips, panels, and other jokes to open the door for them.
This is because most of the important language concepts that we teach (such as parts of speech and sentence structure) are precisely the point where ambiguity can arise, and linguistic ambiguity is the basis of most language oriented humor. Working backwards, if I can find a comic strip or joke that relies on an ambiguity which is centered on a structure that I am . . . → Read More: Understanding Language through Humor: How jokes make concepts clear
By Cambridge Extra, on January 5th, 2012 Written by Elspeth McCartney and Sue Ellis
The text Sue Ellis and Elspeth McCartney (eds), 2011, Applied Linguistics and Primary School Teaching, Cambridge: CUP arose from a British Association of Applied Linguistics/Cambridge University Press multi-disciplinary seminar series including teachers, teacher-educators, speech and language pathologists/therapists, policy-makers and psychologists, with an added international perspective. The book considers how primary/elementary teachers’ linguistic knowledge might be framed, and examines what linguistic knowledge is most useful, how it is best introduced, and how it needs to be understood in the context of the complex and diverse modern school classroom. Two important issues arise in this context – linguistic diversity (see for example Hammond (Chapter Two), Horan and Hersi (Chapter Three), Tierney (Chapter Five) and . . . → Read More: Applied linguistics and children with speech, language and communication needs: issues of teacher knowledge
By Cambridge Extra, on November 16th, 2011 Written by Thomas Hoffmann
From a typological point of view, preposition placement in English is an extremely interesting area of variation: most languages either require a preposition to be dragged along to the start of a clause by a displaced complement (as in the German relative clause das Haus, [in dem]i ich _i lebe vs. *das Haus, [dem]i ich [in _i] lebe) or they obligatorily leave the preposition in its clause-internal position (as in Swedish: huset [som]i jag bor [i _i] ‘the house that I live in’ vs. * huset [i som]i jag bor _i; adopted from Dekeyser 1990: 103). English, on the other hand, allows the preposition in clause-initial position (1a; a phenomenon known as ‘pied-piping’) as well as . . . → Read More: Never end a sentence with a preposition! That is something up with which I will not put!
By Cambridge Extra, on October 17th, 2011 When we become highly proficient in a language, we tend to use it in chunks or patterns. For a native language especially, we learn and become adept at manipulating masses of word patterns such as absolutely not, as it were, in light of the fact that, curry favour, I think that, scattered showers, it’s worth –ing, just a sec, etc. Language patterns like these make communication efficient – we don’t need to spend time piecing together the smallest bits of language. Rather, we work with larger bits that are easily accessed in the memories of both the user and the receiver. However, the pervasiveness of patterning makes it quite a challenge to sound ‘natural’ in second languages. Grammatical rules themselves . . . → Read More: 2010 Language Teaching Christopher Brumfit Award winner Dr Susy Macqueen discusses her award winning dissertation
By Cambridge Extra, on September 19th, 2011 a blog post by Zane Goebel, La Trobe University, Australia
While super-diversity has increasingly become an issue to grapple with in anthropological studies focusing on urban settings (e.g. Blommaert, 2010; Vertovec, 2007), in Indonesia super-diversity has been a concern at least since the emergence of an anti-colonial nationalist movements in the 1920s (Elson, 2008). One significant off-shoot of attempts to come to terms with this diversity were attempts at standardizing a variety of Malay with the idea of it being used as a lingua franca amongst an archipelago of ethnolinguistic others. By the early 1970s Indonesia’s attempt at standardizing and circulating a ‘standard’ was hailed as a significant success by such notable figures as the sociolinguist Joshua Fishman (Dardjowidjojo, 1998). . . . → Read More: Analysing codeswitching practices in super-diverse settings
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