Tomorrow 3 0

The Speech Situation is a term worn with age in the teaching of public speaking in America. That it is comprised of occasion, speaker, and topic is a gross oversimplification. It also includes challenge, anxiety, emotion, fear, responsibility, faults of memory, and instants of pride. Out of the circumstances arise an increase in heart rate, a change in blood pressure, an abnormal pattern of breathing, a noticeable build up in perspiration, and an ongoing evaluation. For students this may be merely a grade or perhaps a series of evaluative remarks, possibly addressed both to the speaker and the other participants, the audience. It may entail a replaying of a record of the speech, indeed a videotape. Most important is the lasting impression that remains with all of the participants. What of the vocabulary of the speaker under the circumstances of the speech situation? This speaker - in the major portions of this work we may say, "this young man" - has spent time seeking an appropriate topic. He has outlined a composition around a central idea or thesis. He has marshaled evidence, details. He has framed an opening paragraph. He has been admonished not to give an essay, but to strive for audience contact, interpersonal communication. He makes his audible approach through his vocabulary and accompanying phonology. Under the tension, the speaker repeats; he adds meaningless vocalizations in periods that might logically be pauses. There are slips of the tongue. At worst, failing, he withdraws to await another day.

Corpus linguistics has had a revolutionary impact on grammar and discourse research. Not only has it opened up entirely new theoretical perspectives and methodological possibilities for both fields, but it has also to a considerable extent erased the boundaries that have traditionally been drawn between them. This book showcases a variety of current corpus-based approaches to the study of grammar and discourse, and makes a case for seeing grammar and discourse as fundamentally inter-related phenomena. The book features contributions from leading experts in cognitive linguistics, construction grammar, critical discourse studies, genre and register analysis, phraseology, language learning and teaching, languages for specific purposes, second language acquisition, sociolinguistics, systemic functional linguistics and text linguistics. An essential reference point for future research, Corpora, Grammar and Discourse has been edited in honour of Susan Hunston, whose own work has consistently pushed at the boundaries of corpus-based research on grammar and discourse for over three decades.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Multimedia Modeling Conference, MMM 2007, held in Kyoto, Japan, in January 2007. The 23 revised full papers and 24 revised poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 130 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections that include material on media understanding, creative media, visual content representation, and video codecs, as well as media retrieval, audio and music.