The Phraseological View Of Language

This volume presents the results of the international symposium Chunks in Corpus Linguistics and Cognitive Linguistics, held at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg to honour John Sinclair's contribution to the development of linguistics in the second half of the twentieth century. The main theme of the book, highlighting important aspects of Sinclair's work, is the idiomatic character of language with a focus on chunks (in the sense of prefabricated items) as extended units of meaning. To pay tribute to Sinclair's enormous impact on research in this field, the volume contains two contributions which deal explicitly with his work, including material from unpublished manuscripts. Beyond that, the articles cover different aspects of chunks ranging from more theoretically-oriented to more applied papers, in which foreign language teaching and the computational application of the insights about the nature of language provided by corpus research play an important role. The volume demonstrates the wide applicability and relevance of the notion of chunks by bringing together research from different fields of linguistics such as theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics and foreign language teaching, and thus provides an interdisciplinary view on the impact of idiomaticity in language.

This volume presents a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of major developments in the study of how phraseology is used in a wide range of different legal and institutional contexts. This recent interest has been mainly sparked by the development of corpus linguistics research, which has both demonstrated the centrality of phraseological patterns in language and provided researchers with new and powerful analytical tools. However, there have been relatively few empirical studies of word combinations in the domain of law and in the many different contexts where legal discourse is used. This book seeks to address this gap by presenting some of the latest developments in the study of this linguistic phenomenon from corpus-based and interdisciplinary perspectives. The volume draws on current research in legal phraseology from a variety of perspectives: translation, comparative/contrastive studies, terminology, lexicography, discourse analysis and forensic linguistics. It contains contributions from leading experts in the field, focusing on a wide range of issues amply illustrated through in-depth corpus-informed analyses and case studies. Most contributions to this book are multilingual, featuring different legal systems and legal languages. The volume will be a valuable resource for linguists interested in phraseology as well as lawyers and legal scholars, translators, lexicographers, terminologists and students who wish to pursue research in the area.

Long regarded as a peripheral issue, phraseology is now taking centre stage in a wide range of fields. This recent explosion of interest undoubtedly has a great deal to do with the development of corpus linguistics research, which has both demonstrated the key role of phraseological expressions in language and provided researchers with automated methods of extraction and analysis. The aim of this volume is to take stock of current research in phraseology from a variety of perspectives: theoretical, descriptive, contrastive, cultural, lexicographic and computational. It contains overview chapters by leading experts in the field and a series of case studies focusing on a wide range of multiword units: collocations, similes, idioms, routine formulae and recurrent phrases. The volume is an invitation for experienced phraseologists to look at the field with different eyes and a useful introduction for the many researchers who are intrigued by phraseology but need help in finding their way in this rich but complex domain.

The book is devoted to various problems of the discoursal use of phraseological units (PUs). It explores both core use and contextual use of such units, as well as different types of PU modifications, including addition, deletion, substitution, cleft use, phraseological pun, and extended metaphor, among others. In addition, the book also considers the translation of these modifications, which often present a very serious issue.

This book addresses the key role of phraseology in second language acquisition and instruction. It is divided into three main sections: "Extracting and Describing Phraseological Units "investigates the role played by native and learner corpora in the extraction and description of multiword units, two initial and crucial steps in informing language pedagogy;" Learning Phraseological Units "deals with the learning aspect, an oft-neglected yet essential dimension of phraseology in second/foreign language pedagogy, this section also addresses issues in new literacies; and "Recording and Exploiting Phraseological Units" focuses on pedagogical tools, notably monolingual and bilingual dictionaries and textbooks. This stimulating collection presents cutting edge research in the field and identifies major avenues for future theoretical and applied work. It is of particular relevance to researchers and teachers interested in the patterned nature of language.

The proposition that there is a correlation between language and culture or culture-specific ways of thinking can be traced back to the views of Herder and von Humboldt in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It is generally accepted today that a language, especially its lexicon, influences its speakers' cultural patterns of thought and perception in various ways, for example through a culture-specific segmentation of the extralinguistic reality, the frequency of occurrence of particular lexical items, or the existence of keywords or key word combinations revealing core cultural values. The aim of this volume is to explore the cultural dimension of a wide range of preconstructed or semi-preconstructed word combinations in English. The 17 papers of the volume are divided into four sections, focusing on particular lexemes (e.g. enjoy and its collocates), types of word combinations (e.g. proverbs and similes), use-related varieties (such as the language of tourism or answering-machine messages), and user-related varieties (such as Aboriginal English or African English). The sections are preceded by a prologue, tracing the development of the study of formulaic language, and followed by an epilogue, which draws together the threads laid out in the various papers. The relation between language and culture in general has been explored in a number of important works over the past ten years. However, the study of the relation between English phraseology and culture in particular has been largely neglected. This volume is the first book-length publication devoted entirely to this topic.

Phraseology, as explored in corpus linguistics, is important to the study of evaluative language. Corpus techniques reveal this phraseology and so assist in, for example, identifying modal meaning and intensifying phrases. The patterns identified by corpus techniques can be used in identifying and parsing instances of evaluation.

Explores the process of word selection in second language use and the factors which determine the writer's choice of words.