Lacus Forum

Argues that most words do not have multiple meanings and criticizes the assignment of additional meanings through overspecification

"The book draws on a lot of research, is friendly to the reader, and will be of good value to teachers." Paul Nation, Victoria University of Wellington, Australia This comprehensive, up-to-date, and accessible text on idiom use, learning, and teaching approaches the topic with a balance of sound theory and extensive research in cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and sociolinguistics combined with informed teaching practices. Idioms is organized in three parts: Part I includes discussion of idiom definition, classification, usage patterns, and functions. Part II investigates the process involved in the comprehension of idioms and the factors that influence individuals’ understanding and use of idioms in both L1 and L2. Part III explores idiom acquisition and the teaching and learning of idioms, focusing especially on the strategies and techniques used to help students learn idioms. To assist the reader in grasping the key issues, study questions are provided at the end of each chapter. The text also includes a glossary of special terms and an annotated list of selective idiom reference books and student textbooks. Idioms is designed to serve either as a textbook for ESL/applied linguistics teacher education courses or as a reference book. No matter how the book is used, it will equip an ESL/applied linguistics students and professionals with a solid understanding of various issues related to idioms and the learning of them.

This volume contains functional approaches to the description of language and culture, and language and cultural change. The approaches taken by the authors range from cognitive approaches including Stratificational grammar to more socially oriented ones including Systemic Functional linguistics. The volume is organized into two sections. The first section 'Functional Approaches to the Structure of Language: Theory and Practice' starts with contributions developing a Stratificational model; these are followed by contributions focusing on some related functional model of language; and by articles describing some particular set of language phenomena.In the second section 'Functional Approaches to the History of Language and Linguistics' general studies of language change are addressed first; a second group of contributions examines language change, lexicon and culture; and the last cluster of contributions treats the history of linguistics and culture.

This collection reflects Minoji Akimoto's concern with studies of change in English that are theoretically-informed, but founded on substantial bodies of data. Some of the contributors focus on individual texts and text-types, among them literature and journalism, others on specific periods, from Old English to the nineteenth century, but the majority trace a linguistic process - such as negation, passivisation, complementation or grammaticalisation - through the history of English. While several papers take a fresh look at manuscript evidence, the harnessing of wideranging electronic corpora is a recurring feature methodologically. The linguistic fields treated include word semantics, stylistics, orthography, word-order, pragmatics and lexicography. The volume also contains a bibliography of Professor Akimoto's writings and an index of linguistic terms.

Slang is often seen as a lesser form of language, one that is simply not as meaningful or important as its 'regular' counterpart. Connie Eble refutes this notion as she reveals the sources, poetry, symbolism, and subtlety of informal slang expressions. In Slang and Sociability, Eble explores the words and phrases that American college students use casually among themselves. Based on more than 10,000 examples submitted by Eble's students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill over the last twenty years, the book shows that slang is dynamic vocabulary that cannot be dismissed as deviant or marginal. Like more formal words and phrases, slang is created, modified, and transmitted by its users to serve their own purposes. In the case of college students, these purposes include cementing group identity and opposing authority. The book includes a glossary of the more than 1,000 slang words and phrases discussed in the text, as well as a list of the 40 most enduring terms since 1972. Examples from the glossary: group gropes -- encounter groups squirrel kisser -- environmentalist Goth -- student who dresses in black and listens to avant-garde music bad bongos -- situation in which things do not go well triangle -- person who is stupid or not up on the latest za -- pizza smoke -- to perform well dead soldier -- empty beer container toast -- in big trouble, the victim of misfortune parental units -- parents