Kyt& - Böcker

English Corpus Linguistics is a step-by-step guide to creating and analyzing linguistic corpora. It begins with a discussion of the role that corpus linguistics plays in linguistic theory, demonstrating that corpora have proven to be very useful resources for linguists who believe that their theories and descriptions of English should be based on real rather than contrived data. Charles F. Meyer goes on to describe how to plan the creation of a corpus, how to collect and computerize data for inclusion in a corpus, how to annotate the data that are collected, and how to conduct a corpus analysis of a completed corpus. The book concludes with an overview of the challenges that corpus linguists face to make both the creation and analysis of corpora much easier undertakings than they currently are. Clearly organized and accessibly written, this book will appeal to students of linguistics and English language.

This study sheds light on the complex relationship between cognitive and linguistic categories. Challenging the view of cases as categories in cognitive space, Professor Schlesinger proposes an understanding of the concept of case. Drawing on evidence from psycholinguistic research and English language data, he argues that case categories are in fact composed of more primitive cognitive notions: features and dimensions. These are registered in the lexical entries of individual verbs, thereby allowing certain metaphorical extensions. This approach to case permits better descriptions of certain syntactic phenomena, as Schlesinger illustrates through the analysis of the feature compositions of three cases.

This book explores the history of the English language in China from the arrival of the first English-speaking traders in the early seventeenth century to the present. Kingsley Bolton brings together and examines a substantial body of historical, linguistic and sociolinguistic research on the description and analysis of English in Hong Kong and China. He uses early wordlists, satirical cartoons and data from journals and memoirs, as well as more conventional sources, to uncover the forgotten history of English in China and to show how contemporary Hong Kong English has its historical roots in Chinese pidgin English. The book also considers the varying status of English in mainland China over time, and recent developments since 1997. With its interdisciplinary perspective, the book will appeal not only to linguists, but to all those working in the fields of Asian studies and English studies, including those concerned with cultural and literary studies.

Apposition in Contemporary English is a full-length treatment of apposition. It provides detailed discussion of its linguistic characteristics and of its usage in various kinds of speech and writing, derived from the data of British and American computer corpora. Charles Meyer demonstrates the inadequacies of previous studies and argues that apposition is a grammatical relation realized by constructions having particular syntactic, semantic and pragmatic characteristics, of which certain are dominant. The language of press reportage, fiction, learned writing and spontaneous conversation is analysed.

Speakers of British and American English display some striking differences in their use of grammar. In this detailed survey, John Algeo considers questions such as: •Who lives on a street, and who lives in a street? •Who takes a bath, and who has a bath? •Who says Neither do I, and who says Nor do I? •After 'thank you', who says Not at all and who says You're welcome? •Whose team are on the ball, and whose team isn't? Containing extensive quotations from real-life English on both sides of the Atlantic, collected over the past twenty years, this is a clear and highly organized guide to the differences - and the similarities - between the grammar of British and American speakers. Written for those with no prior knowledge of linguistics, it shows how these grammatical differences are linked mainly to particular words, and provides an accessible account of contemporary English in use.

Inspired by the ideas of the Prague School, the theory of functional sentence perspective (FSP) is concerned with the distribution of information as determined by all meaningful elements, from intonation (for speech) to context. A central feature of FSP is communicative dynamism. Jan Firbas discusses the distribution of the degrees of communicative dynamism over sentence elements, which determines the orientation or perspective of the sentence. He examines also the relation of theme and rheme to, and implementation by, syntactic components. Special attention is paid to the relation between FSP and word order. The second part of the book deals with spoken communication and considers the place of intonation in the interplay of FSP factors, establishing the concept of prosodic prominence. It tackles the relationship between the distribution of degrees of communicative dynamism as determined by the interplay of the non-prosodic FSP factors and the distribution of degrees of prosodic prominence as brought about by intonation.