Books in the Linguistic Insights series

Current Trends in LSP Research

The volume offers a collection of best practice European projects carried out in university contexts with the aim of highlighting the relevant role that Language Centres play in the field of language learning. A variety of project topics is described showing project coordinators' willingness of promoting cooperation which encourages a wide-angled multilingual and multicultural perspective.

This book explores the ways in which the use of English as a medium of instruction can contribute to a closer alignment between educational outcomes and the demands of the world of work in those contexts where English is used as a foreign language.

This book examines media representation of migrant workers in China. Drawing on discourse analysis and sociolinguistic theories, it investigates how identities of and stances towards migrant workers were constructed and mediated in media with a view to exploring the interrelationship between media representation and social change in China.

This volume comprises a selection of papers delivered at the Fourth ELC International Postgraduate Conference on Language and Cognition (ELC4). The eleven papers collected here pertain to different areas of linguistics as varied as diachronic linguistics, syntax, pragmatics or psycholinguistics.

This volume provides a shared context for surfacing deeply held beliefs and providing clearer pathways for closer understanding and adaptations to support integrated learning. The studies in each of the eight chapters are built on an in-depth critical review of research which enables the reader to carefully position the challenging questions posed.

This volume investigates the difficulties adult L2 users of English encounter with plosive consonants. It presents the results of two tasks examining the acquisition of plosive voicing contrasts by college students with CG backgrounds. These results are discussed in relation to the approaches of second language phonology and speech perception.

Catorce investigadores de diferentes países y nacionalidades, especialistas en diferentes campos de estudio sobre la lengua española ¿ Didáctica del ELE y del EFE, lengua de especialidad, lexicología, lingüística aplicada, terminología, traducción ¿, resaltan, al enfocar el léxico dentro de un contexto profesional y cultural específicos, la permeabilidad y renovación de la lengua española. Sus investigaciones inéditas que se enmarcan dentro de diversas perspectivas y áreas de investigación como la cibernética, la cognitiva, la didáctica, la estructuralista y la lingüística aplicada, abordan temas como los préstamos, las colocaciones sintácticas, la traducción, el léxico profesional y de especialidad, el discurso retórico de la prensa, el lenguaje del turismo, los enfoques didácticos sobre el léxico. El resultado de sus análisis de corpus muestra diferentes interpretaciones del léxico español dentro de los ámbitos arriba mencionados.

This volume deals with collocations from a lexicographic perspective by addressing, in detail, the boundaries between collocations and other word combinations, the possibility of adapting the definition of collocation to the objectives of specific dictionaries, and approaches towards collocation extraction for lexicographic purposes.

This book presents a comparative interdisciplinary socio-psycholinguistic study on plurilingual code-switching (CS) in Italy, Croatia and Scotland-UK, based on Italian in contact with four standard varieties (Spanish, English, Philipino and Croatian) and five non-standard varieties (Arbereshe, Occitan, Calabrese, Istrovenetian and Chakavski).

The aim of this book is to propose an original hypothesis to account for the difficulties associated with dyslexia, suggesting that this disorder is characterized by deficits affecting the subject's phonological and processing abilities. The results of four experimental protocols are discussed, providing further support for this hypothesis.

As a corpus-based typological cognitive study of English binominal quantitative expressions based on English-Chinese comparison, the book discovers functional equivalents of Chinese numeral classifiers in English, i.e. `Quasi-Numeral Classifiers' (QNCs) and unveils the categorisation process reflected by five cases of Dimensionality-based QNCs.

The focus of this book is to investigate interprofessional telephone interaction, a routine yet disruptive activity at the hospital, and to expose how nurses and physicians coordinate in view of delivering efficient patient care. The analysis of recorded calls at a Swiss hospital displays the variable formats through which nurses produce requests.

The book examines the linguistic varieties in the MS 133 Digby Mary Magdalene. It shows that most unusual forms are diatopic and diastratic alternatives used in specific religious contexts to realize well-defined sociolinguistic purposes.

The book explores how recent forms of resistance to European integration have affected the way in which the EU discursively represents itself to the public as a legitimate political entity. It detects the longitudinal evolution of the discursive strategies enacted by the EU in the field of communication policy to encourage popular endorsement.

This book gives an overview of telephone interpretation, a modality of remote interpretation that is becoming more and more popular for its benefits. It focusses on many of the aspects that shape this new modality of interpretation from a professional, innovative and pedagogical approach.

The question whether bilingualism is linked to benefits in cognitive control (executive functions) is intensely debated among linguists. While some studies come to the conclusion that bilingual individuals consistently outperform their monolingual counterparts on tasks involving cognitive control, other studies argue that there is no coherent evidence showing that bilingual advantages actually exist. This opposing view results from two inadequately investigated perspectives, namely the complexities of bilingualism and the multifaceted nature of cognitive control. This publication combines these two perspectives and presents a new approach towards the analysis of bilingual advantage. It discusses the results of a combined analysis of both specific bilingual experiences and specific aspects of cognitive control.

This volume presents a cross-disciplinary analysis of academic poster presentations, taking into consideration the text and visuals that posters display depending on the discipline within which they are created. As the academic poster is a multimodal genre, different modal aspects have been taken into consideration when analysing it, a fact that has somehow complicated the genre analysis conducted, but has also stimulated the research work involved and, in the end, provided interesting results. The analysis carried out here has highlighted significant cross-disciplinary differences in terms of word count, portrait/landscape orientation and layout of posters, as well as discipline and subdiscipline-specific patterns for what concerns the use of textual interactive and interactional metadiscourse resources and visual interactive resources. The investigation has revealed what textual and visual metadiscourse resources are employed, where and why, and as a consequence, what textual and visual metadiscourse strategies should be adopted by poster authors depending on the practices and expectations of their academic community.

This book examines the English lingua-franca (ELF) uses in a corpus of online and scripted video-game interactions. While research generally explores the playful and technological aspects of computer-mediated communication, this study focuses on the strategies of cooperation, language simplification and authentication, lexical creativity and meaning negotiation that are generally activated within the community of practice of gamers to facilitate cross-cultural conversations. The scripted exchanges, instead, are examined by means of the ALFA Model (Analysis of Lingua Franca in Audiovisual texts), which is devised to enquire into the extent to which the non-native participants' language variations are part of the multimodal actualisation of the cognitive construct of non-native speakers, to which authors resort in order to prompt specific reactions on the part of the receivers. Finally, since the participants' turns in both online and scripted interactions are visually represented as written messages on screen, this research also contributes to the development of the description of written ELF variations, so far not thoroughly explored in the literature.

Through a selection of empirical studies anchored in analyses of authentic and contextualized language data, Taboo in Discourse explores the complex interplay between taboo and language in a range of social contexts, cultural settings and real-world discourse types from a broad and multidisciplinary perspective.

Using the Devil with Courtesy analyses Renaissance forms of (im)politeness through Shakespeare. Adopting a historical pragmatic perspective drawing in particular on Brown and Levinson (1987), Jucker (2010) and Culpeper (2011), the book focuses specifically on Hamlet (c. 1601) and The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1594).

Bringing together a series of studies on the nature of the dissemination of specialist knowledge in English, this book explores the use of language in the creation and diffusion of knowledge, in its transformation from being a mere repository of information, achieved through complex discursive processes.

Aunque generalmente se piense que la manera mas eficiente y exitosa para perfeccionar una segunda lengua es estudiar en el extranjero, la investigacion empirica se han enfocado en la adquisicion de rasgos de la lengua estandar en oposicion a aquellos variables. Por consiguiente, esta monografia investiga hasta que punto aprendices de espanol como segunda lengua adquieren estructuras variables de la lengua -leismo y laismo- mientras realizan un programa de inmersion en el extranjero de cuatro meses de duracion. Este trabajo esta formado por dos grupos de aprendices de espanol matriculados en dos diferentes tipos de programas en Madrid (un programa academico ordinario vs. un programa academico con practicas de voluntariado) y un grupo de hablantes nativos. Es una investigacion longitudinal cuantitativa y cualitativa de datos orales y escritos. Este volumen contribuye a comprender mejor la adquisicion de la variacion dialectal, a documentar, de manera original, la relacion entre las competencias intercultural y sociolinguistica, y a dar a conocer, por primera vez, el impacto del tipo de programa en el desarrollo sociolinguistico de aprendices de espanol como segunda lengua.El impresionante trabajo de Salgado-Robles conecta las disciplinas de adquisicin de segundas lenguas, estudios en el extranjero y sociolingstica para documentar cmo se adquiere la capacidad de usar la lengua en su contexto social y geogrfico. Lo ms destacado en su metodologa incluye una detalla explicacin sobre las correlaciones lingsticas del uso pronominal en espaol y los patrones de uso diario de la lengua por parte de aprendices en dos tipos de programas. Este volumen har una contribucin fundamental al estudio de la adquisicin de la competencia sociolingstica. Kimberly L. Geeslin, Catedrtica de Lingstica Hispnica, Indiana University

Medium-sized language communities face competition between local and global languages such as Spanish, Russian, French and, above all, English. The various regions of Spain where Catalan is spoken, Denmark, the Czech Republic, and Lithuania show how their medium-sized languages (a term used to distinguish them as much from minority codes as from more widely-spoken codes) coexist alongside or struggle with their big brothers in multilingual families. This comparative analysis offers unique insight into language contact in present-day Europe.