Books in the Linguistic Insights series

This volume provides a practical introduction and a functional analysis of English false friends. It presents an innovative perspective on the subject and offers new insights into the intricacies of false friends through the study of learner language.

Verbs of Desire underwent important changes in the course of their histories. In earlier English they could be used impersonally in constructions lacking a nominative subject. When impersonal uses are lost, they are gradually replaced by personal patterns, in particular a pattern where the verb governs a prepositional complement.

Discourses, Communities, and Global Englishes

A selection of the papers presented at the Second ELC International Postgraduate Conference on English Linguistics (ELC2), held at the University of Vigo in October 2009 and designed and organised by postgraduate students belonging to the English Departments of the Universities of Vigo and Santiago de Compostela.

Corpus Linguistics in Language Teaching

Content and Foreign Language Integrated Learning

The book explores some of the best-known contributions to Narrative Theory as used in the study of academic and professional discourse and actions. The volume not only incorporates a wide range of contexts to analyse narratives, it also uses narrative as a powerful methodological tool to investigate theoretical issues.

The eighteen chapters in this volume look at the use of corpus analysis for descriptive and pedagogical purposes, focusing on contexts where English is employed by specialists in the professions and academia. They also debate some of the challenges arising from the complex relationship between linguistic theory, data-mining tools and statistical methods.

This monograph's value resides in its detailed functional analysis of Left Dislocation, both from a cognitive-informational and a discourse-functional point of view. The former analysis focuses on features such as topic continuity and information status of the dislocated referent. The latter focuses on the multifunctional character of LD at the discourse level.

Coop Voiello Superga nomi propri? nomi comuni? Come funzionano i nomi commerciali (o marchionimi) nella lingua, quali tratti presentano quando entrano nel discorso?Il volume rappresenta il primo ampio studio sistematico sul funzionamento dei nomi commerciali nell'italiano scritto. Il suo carattere innovativo risiede nell'impostazione sperimentale con cui indaga i marchionimi, scandagliando sintatticamente un vasto corpus di dati testuali appositamente elaborato. Prendendo ispirazione ideale dalla lezione di Saussure, i nomi commerciali sono processualmente descritti nei loro valori correlativi: non come entit ontologicamente predefinite, bens come il risultato di rapporti sintagmatici e paradigmatici da cogliere metodologicamente nell'analisi delle proposizioni in cui tali nomi ricorrono. Ne emerge una visione radicalmente nuova del nome commerciale, scevra da luoghi comuni onomastici o categoriali, e in grado di gettare un fascio di luce, da una prospettiva inconsueta, anche sul problema millenario dei nomi propri.

This book analyses medical communication from a range of innovative perspectives, not only from a merely linguistic angle, but also from a social and cultural standpoint, with an emphasis both on the doctor-patient relationship and on the social relevance of the other communicative links existing between the many communities involved in this type of interaction.

This book is a collection of papers dealing with the study of language varieties from a corpus linguistics perspective. They focus on the analysis of language in different communicative and professional settings, meeting current lines of research, such as teaching and learning, translation, domain-specific grammatical and textual phenomena, linguistic variation and gender.

This volume investigates the discursive practices of arbitration proceedings in some important Asian countries. The texts taken into consideration include not only norms and awards, but also interviews with professionals in the field so as to gain direct insights into the linguistic and textual choices employed in the drafting of these documents.

Pragmatic competence plays a key role in intercultural communication, particularly for students studying in a target community. This book investigates the effect of study abroad on second language learners' productive and receptive pragmatic competences, as well as their cognitive processes during speech act production. It employs a variety of research instruments, both quantitative and qualitative, to explore learners' pragmatic development over one year. The inclusion of a control group is a methodological strength of the longitudinal study, many such studies often not including a control group. In addition, the study longitudinally examines learners' cognitive processes during study abroad with innovative and insightful analyses. The book makes an important contribution to second language pragmatics with regard to developmental changes in both speech act production and perception during such processes.

The volume focuses on discourse-pragmatic studies on evidentiality, epistemic modality, and on deontic modality. It presents studies on the functions and discourse-pragmatic variation of evidential and modal expressions, applying corpus-based methodologies and addressing cross-linguistic issues in several European languages.

The aim of this volume is to give voice to the various perspectives in the investigation of tourism discourse in its written, spoken, and visual aspects. The chapters focus on the interaction between the participants involved in the tourism practices, that is the promoters of tourist destinations, tourists or prospective tourists.

This volume focuses on the study of linguistic manipulation, persuasion and power in the written texts of professional communication, bringing forth studies on the language of various specialised fields such as law and arbitration, engineering, economics, advertising, business, politics, medicine, social work, education and the media.

This volume gives voice to the views and experiences of researchers, lecturers, administrative staff, teacher trainers and students with regard to the implementation of English-medium instruction in a public university based in the north-east of Italy.

The volume Learning second language pragmatics beyond traditional contexts is a collection of studies dealing with the acquisition of second language pragmatic competence in different learning contexts.

This volume explores knowledge dissemination practices according to two main orientations; first, with respect to the target audience, especially scholars vs. novices. Second in relation to the channels, especially multimodal and web-based platforms, and changing strategies such as popularization resources.

This book brings together contributions by a number of distinguished scholars that shed new light on current developments in this dynamic area of discourse analysis, especially taking into account recent research and emerging insights on speech communities and communities of practice.

Two complementary case studies are presented. First, a cross-varietal study indicates that high-contact varieties of English exhibit a higher attestation rate of pronoun omission than low-contact varieties. Second, a corpus-based study demonstrates that pronouns are commonly omitted in contexts in which their antecedents can be easily identified.

The advent of digital media has changed political communication. Populist movements are adept at using the affordances of new media.Digital media also make it easier than ever for the public to respond to politicians, or to launch their own initiatives.These changes are analysed across countries as diverse as Venezuela, USA, Pakistan and Romania.

Corrective feedback in traditional and technology-enhanced environments continues to be a controversial topic in the field of SLA. Through a discussion of theoretical, empirical, and pedagogical issues, this book contributes to the debate on the role of corrective feedback in second language development, with a focus on CALL environments.

The book investigates conflict discourse in an interdisciplinary way, bringing together linguistics and periodical studies and highlighting the connection between language and ideology. It focuses on lexical choices and rhetorical devices used to tackle controversial issues.

The book showcases grammatical, pragmatic, and stylistic functions of punctuation, and shows how punctuation can encode emotion, metalinguistic marking, foregrounding and paralinguistic indications. It also highlights the sensibility of punctuation to genre and the speech-writing continuum, and shows how punctuation conventions change in time.

The 18 chapters of the volume explore the potential of using both cross-sectional and longitudinal learner corpora to investigate the interlanguage of learners of English, Italian and Spanish from various L1 backgrounds. The chapters also discuss possible applications to foreign language teaching and assessment.