A significant number of d/Deaf and hard of hearing (d/Dhh) children and adolescents experience challenges in acquiring a functional level of English language and literacy skills in the United States (and elsewhere). To provide an understanding of this issue, this book explores the theoretical underpinnings and synthesizes major research findings. It also covers critical controversial areas such…
The goal of this Special Issue is to bring together state-of-the art articles on applied linguistics which reflect investigation carried out by researchers from different parts of the world. By bringing together papers from different perspectives, we hope to be able to gain a better understanding of the field. Hence, this Special Issue intends to address the study of language in its different d…
One significant area of research in the multifaceted field of bilingualism over the past two decades has been the demonstration, validation, and account of the so-called ‘bilingual advantage’. This refers to the hypothesis that bilingual speakers have advanced abilities in executive functions and other domains of human cognition. Such cognitive benefits of bilingualism have an impact on the…
This volume investigates the nature of grammatical representations in speakers who master multiple languages. Since the early days of modern formal approaches to grammar, most work has been based on the language of monolingual humans. Less work has been conducted based on data from speakers who possess more than one language. Although important insights have been gained from a monolingual focus…
The changing state of reading and its fate in the digitalised world is one of the core issues in the contemporary debates about the future of culture. The central position of the printed word, and primarily, books as the most valuable cultural medium and the main source of knowledge, are becoming questioned in the age of the Internet. Reading as gateway to the world of fantasies has been challe…
This book is an open access publication edited by IntechOpen. Its main goal is to summarize current research in the discourse analysis area. It provides a scientific platform for researchers to publish the latest studies and developments in both theoretical and practical aspects of discourse analysis and to make it more visible. The book is an excellent way for disseminating inspiring visions, …
Does gender condition politicians’ discourse strategies in parliament? This is the question we try to answer in A Gender-based Approach to Parliamentary Discourse: The Andalusian Parliament. This book, written by experts in the field of discourse analysis, covers key aspects of political discourse such as gender, identity and verbal and nonverbal strategies: intensification, enumerative serie…
The contributions to this volume investigate relations of cohesion and coherence as well as instantiations of discourse phenomena and their interaction with information structure in multilingual contexts. Some contributions concentrate on procedures to analyze cohesion and coherence from a corpus-linguistic perspective. Others have a particular focus on textual cohesion in parallel corpora that…
In English, phonological double consonants only occur across morphological boundaries, for example, in affixation (e.g. in unnatural, innumerous). There are two possibilities for the phonetic realization of these morphological geminates: Either the phonological double is realized with a longer duration than a phonological singleton (gemination), or it is of the same duration as a singleton cons…
The book examines to what extent the mediating relation between constituents and their semantics can arise from combinatory knowledge of words. It traces the roots of Combinatory Categorial Grammar, and uses the theory to promote a Humean question in linguistics and cognitive science: Why do we see limited constituency and dependency in natural languages, despite their diversity and potential i…
Definiteness has been a central topic in theoretical semantics since its modern foundation. However, despite its significance, there has been surprisingly scarce research on its cross-linguistic expression. With the purpose of contributing to filling this gap, the present volume gathers thirteen studies exploiting insights from formal semantics and syntax, typological and language specific stud…
The present work is a study of the Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini from a new perspective. It attempts to explore the Pāṇinian system of Sanskrit grammar from a formal point of view and investigate the possibilities of representing it in a logical, explicit and consistent manner. It puts forward an appropriate framework for such a representation. Differing from the formulation of Aṣṭādhy…
"This book introduces formal grammar theories that play a role in current linguistic theorizing (Phrase Structure Grammar, Transformational Grammar/Government & Binding, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Construction Grammar, Tree Adjoining Grammar). The key assumptions are explained and it is shown how…
A conversation between two people can only take place if the words intended by each speaker are successfully recognized. Spoken word recognition is at the heart of language comprehension. This automatic and smooth process remains a challenge for models of spoken word recognition. Both the process of mapping the speech signal onto stored representations for words, and the format of the represent…
"Voices and Practices in Applied Linguistics comprises a selection of original applied linguistics-based research on the theme of the diversity of Applied Linguistics and in Applied Linguistics. It is a unique collection of reflections and cutting-edge research relating to academic, policy and professional fields of Applied Linguistics, featuring chapters written by founders of the field, e…
This study makes substantial contributions to both the theoretical and computational treatment of information structure, with a specific focus on creating natural language processing applications such as multilingual machine translation systems. The present study first provides cross-linguistic findings in regards to information structure meanings and markings. Building upon such findings, the …
"Empirical research is carried out in a cyclic way: approaching a research area bottom-up, data lead to interpretations and ideally to the abstraction of laws, on the basis of which a theory can be derived. Deductive research is based on a theory, on the basis of which hypotheses can be formulated and tested against the background of empirical data. Looking at the state-of-the-art in translatio…
Traditional dialects have been encroached upon by the increasing mobility of their speakers and by the onslaught of national languages in education and mass media. Typically, older dialects are “leveling” to become more like national languages. This is regrettable when the last articulate traces of a culture are lost, but it also promotes a complex dynamics of interaction as speakers shift …
By highlighting relations between experimental and theoretical work, this volume explores new ways of addressing one of the central challenges in the study of language and cognition. The articles bring together work by leading scholars and younger researchers in psychology, linguistics and philosophy. An introductory chapter lays out the background on concept composition, a problem that is stim…
The syllable is a natural unit of organization in spoken language whose strongest cross-linguistic patterns are often explained in terms of a universal preference for the CV structure. Syllable patterns involving long sequences of consonants are both typologically rare and theoretically marginalized, with few approaches treating these as natural or unproblematic structures. This book is an inve…