By Katie, on July 19th, 2018%
Blog post written by Gordana Lalic-Krstin and Nadezda Silaski, authors of the article ‘From Brexit to Bregret: An account of some Brexit-induced neologisms in English’ recently published in English Today.
What are the linguistic consequences of Brexit? Judging by the material we collected from news media (broadcast and online), Facebook and Twitter, blogs and internet forums, the event has generated a myriad of neologisms in English, using Brexit as a model or as a source word.
Brexit was modelled after Grexit, a word coined to denote the possibility of Greece leaving the Eurozone, giving rise to at least two more similarly coined blends, Spexit and Itexit, referring to the prospect of the same event in Spain and Italy. However, this was just a beginning . . . → Read More: What are the linguistic consequences of Brexit?
By Katie, on March 28th, 2018%
Welcome on board as Editor of English Today. What was it about the journal that attracted you to the post?
Thank you for the warm welcome from CUP, and to the support and assistance I have been given in the month leading up to the formal installation as Editor of English Today. The journal is one of the most important journals of formal and functional description of English varieties, and this is the primary attraction to working with the journal. The journal also has a very different ‘look’ from other academic publications, and it is easy to see that English Today’s readership comes from many diverse disciplines and orientations toward the English language, and I find that to be an especially appealing feature . . . → Read More: Q & A with new English Today Editor Andrew Moody
By Katie, on May 11th, 2016%
Blog post based on an article in Journal of Child Language
Written by Written by Melanie Soderstrom in consultation with article co-authors Eon-Suk Ko, Amanda Seidl, and Alejandrina Crista
It has long been known that adults’ speech patterns unconsciously become more similar over the course of a conversation, but do children converge in this way with their caregivers? Across many areas of child development, children’s imitation of caregivers has long been understood to be an important component of the developmental process. These concepts are similar, but we tend to think of imitation as one-sided and static, while convergence is more dynamic and involves both interlocutors influencing each other. In our study, we set out to examine how duration and pitch characteristics of vocalizations by . . . → Read More: Entrainment of prosody in the interaction of mothers with their young children
By Katie, on May 5th, 2016%
Blog post supplementary to an article in English Today written by © M. Lynne Murphy
Last night, I wondered ‘aloud’ on Twitter if British-American English dictionaries are the worst lexicographical products out there. This was after flipping through The Anglo-American Interpreter: a word and phrase book by H. W. Horwill (1939). At first, when I read Horwill’s claims that Americans ask for the time with What time have you?, I thought ‘Wow, American English has changed a lot since 1939’. But as I kept reading the unexpected items in the American column on each page, the British column sounded more and more like contemporary American English. I started to suspect something was amiss. And in the preface I found it: ‘The present book is . . . → Read More: (Un)separated by a common language?
By Katie, on April 29th, 2016%
‘Checking in on Grammar Checking’ by Robert Dale is the latest Industry Watch column to be published in the journal Natural Language Engineering.
Reflecting back to 2004, industry expert Robert Dale reminds us of a time when Microsoft Word was the dominant software used for grammar checking. Bringing us up-to-date in 2016, Dale discusses the evolution, capabilities and current marketplace for grammar checking and its diverse range of users: from academics, men on dating websites to the fifty top celebrities on Twitter.
Below is an extract from the article, which is available to read in full here.
An appropriate time to reflect
I am writing this piece on a very special day. It’s National Grammar Day, ‘observed’ (to . . . → Read More: Checking in on grammar checking
By Katie, on April 5th, 2016%
Blog post written by Sara Incera and Conor T. McLennan based on an article in the journal Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
We analyzed how participants moved a computer mouse in order to compare the performance of bilinguals and monolinguals in a Stroop task. Participants were instructed to respond to the color of the words by clicking on response options on the screen. For example, if the word blue appeared in the center of the screen and was presented in the color yellow, he or she was supposed to click on the response option containing yellow, which appeared in one of the top corners of the screen, and not on the response option containing blue, which appeared in the opposite corner. The ability to . . . → Read More: Mouse tracking reveals that bilinguals behave like experts
By Katie, on March 30th, 2016%
Blog post written by Werner Botha based on an article in English Today
Between 2009 and 2010, and again between 2012 and 2014, I visited a number of higher education institutes in China in order to research the role of English in the Chinese higher education system. One interesting finding from this research was that China has evidently started promoting itself as a hub for international education. Although the largest proportion of foreign students in China today are attracted by Chinese language programmes, an increasing number of such students are signing up for full degree courses in subjects such as medicine and engineering. An interesting phenomenon is that some university degree programmes in the country are being offered as English-medium degrees to foreign . . . → Read More: English and international students in China today
By Katie, on March 23rd, 2016%
Blog post written by Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez and Alba Luzondo Oyón based on and article in the journal Language and Cognition
There is a variety of ways in which English can express resulting events. Some take the form of non-figurative changes of state, as in Cold temperatures froze the river solid, which is an example of the intransitive resultative constructions. Others, like the intransitive motion syntactic frame (e.g. The horse jumped over the fence) and the caused-motion configuration (e.g. Tom kicked the ball into the net) depict literal changes of location. Interestingly enough, many outcome events require a figurative interpretation. Some cases in point are the following: changes of state expressed in terms of figurative motion (e.g. Miners drank themselves into oblivion); self-instigated . . . → Read More: Figurative and non-figurative motion in the expression of result in English
By Katie, on March 18th, 2016%
François Grosjean is interviewed about his Psychology Today blog, “Life as a bilingual”, by Ewa Haman, Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw.
The Polish translation appeared under the title, “Nie mógłbym nawet marzyć o takiej liczbie czytelników” on dwujęzyczność.info.
Why did you choose to write a blog for Psychology Today?
When Carlin Flora, Editor at Psychology Today, wrote to me in the summer of 2010 to ask me if I would be willing to have a blog on bilingualism, I asked for a few weeks to think about it. The reason was that as an academic I mainly write scholarly papers, chapters, and books. Blog posts seemed a bit short at first (800-1000 words per post as compared to tens of pages for papers!) . . . → Read More: Who could have imagined this kind of success for a scientific blog on bilingualism?
By Katie, on March 16th, 2016%
Blog post written by J. Douglas Mastin and Paul Vogt based on an article in Journal of Child Language
This study analyzes how individuals in rural and urban Mozambican engage with infants during naturalistic observations. We assess how the proportion of time spent at 13-months in different types of engagement (i.e., being alone, observing others, interacting with and without goals) relates to infants’ language development over the second year of life. We created an extended version of Bakeman and Adamson’s (1984) categorization of infant engagement, and investigated how a more detailed analysis of infant engagement can contribute to our understanding of vocabulary development in natural settings.
In addition, we explored how different engagements relate to vocabulary size, and how these differ between the rural . . . → Read More: Infant engagement and early vocabulary development: a naturalistic observation study of Mozambican infants from 1;1 to 2;1
|
|
Recent Comments