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Corpus Stylistics
This book combines stylistic analysis with corpus linguistics to present an innovative account of the phenomenon of speech, writing and thought presentation - commonly referred to as 'speech reporting' or 'discourse presentation'. This new account is based on an extensive analysis of a quarter-of-a-million word electronic collection of written narrative texts, including both fiction and non-fiction. The book includes detailed discussions of:
The construction of this corpus of late twentieth-century written British narratives taken from fiction, newspaper news reports and (auto)biographies
The development of a manual annotation system for speech, writing and thought presentation and its application to the corpus.
The findings of a quantitive and qualitative analysis of the forms and functions of speech, writing and thought presentation in the three genres represented in the corpus.
The findings of the analysis of a range of specific phenomena, including hypothetical speech, writing and thought presentation, embedded speech, writing and thought presentation and ambiguities in speech, writing and thought presentation.
Two case studies concentrating on specific texts from the corpus.
Corpus Stylistics shows how stylistics, and text/discourse analysis more generally, can benefit from the use of a corpus methodology and the authors' innovative approach results in a more reliable and comprehensive categorisation of the forms of speech, writing and thought presentation than have been suggested so far. This book is essential reading for linguists interested in the areas of stylistics and corpus linguistics.
Elena Semino is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and Modern English Language at Lancaster University. She is the author of Language and World Creation in Poems and Other Texts (1997), and co-editor (with Jonathan Culpetter) of Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis (2002). Mick Short is Professor of English Language and Literature at Lancaster University. He has written Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose (1997) and (with Geoffrey Leech) Style in Fiction (1997). He founded the Poetics and Linguistics Association and was the founding editor of its international journal, Language and Literature.
1. A Corpus-Based Approach to the Study of Discourse Presentation in Written Narratives 2. Methodology: The Construction and Annotation of the Corpus 3. A Revised Model of Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation 4. Speech Presentation in the Corpus: A Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis 5. Writing Presentation in the Corpus: A Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis 6. Thought Presentation in the Corpus: A Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis 7. Specific Phenomena in Speech, Writing Presentation 8. Case Studies of Specific Texts from the Corpus 9. Conclusion
eBook
Beyond Decoding
The debate over the science of reading has focused primarily on decoding (i.e., connecting letters and sounds to read words) and whether to use phonics to teach it. However, research on reading has included much more than decoding. Language comprehension, which allows readers to derive meaning from text, is an equally critical component of reading. Research has suggested that explicit instruction on the components of language comprehension—vocabulary and semantics, morphology, and syntax—can support language and reading comprehension. To inform the field on the science of reading as it pertains to language comprehension, in this meta-analysis of recent language comprehension interventions (n = 43) in U.S. elementary schools, the authors examined whether effects vary depending on participant and intervention characteristics. Findings suggest positive effects on custom measures of vocabulary, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension but not on standardized measures of these outcomes. Results also indicate positive effects for English learners and promise for multicomponent interventions and those that include technology. Much more research is needed on how best to support language comprehension for underserved populations (e.g., students from low-income backgrounds) and how interventions can be optimized to support generalizable language and literacy outcomes. Implications for policy and practice are discussed.
Journal Article
Teaching Bilingual Learners
Students are expected to comprehend and produce increasingly complex texts in upper elementary school, and academic language and literacy skills are considered critical to meeting these expectations. Notions of academic language are also controversial and require careful deliberation when applied to traditionally minoritized populations, including bilingual learners who negotiate more than one language in their daily lives and have varied linguistic repertoires. In the present study, the authors report on a quasi-experimental field trial of a theoretically grounded and language-based reading intervention framed around language components (semantics, syntax, and morphology), language functions, discussion, and reading comprehension. A sample of 239 Portuguese–English and Spanish–English bilingual students in grades 4 and 5 worked in small instructional groups to explore language, apply reading strategies, and discuss and write about big ideas in text. Half of the students were assigned to the intervention group (n = 119) and the other half (n = 120) to a business-as-usual control group. Classroom teachers (n = 12) and specialists (n = 10) implemented the intervention with small groups of four to six students. Results showed practically meaningful effects of the intervention on standardized measures of both academic language (Hedges’s g = 0.248) and reading comprehension (Hedges’s g = 0.166), with implications for theory, research, and classroom practice.
Journal Article
Improved Spoken Language Representation for Intent Understanding in a Task-Oriented Dialogue System
Successful applications of deep learning technologies in the natural language processing domain have improved text-based intent classifications. However, in practical spoken dialogue applications, the users’ articulation styles and background noises cause automatic speech recognition (ASR) errors, and these may lead language models to misclassify users’ intents. To overcome the limited performance of the intent classification task in the spoken dialogue system, we propose a novel approach that jointly uses both recognized text obtained by the ASR model and a given labeled text. In the evaluation phase, only the fine-tuned recognized language model (RLM) is used. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme is effective at classifying intents in the spoken dialogue system containing ASR errors.
Journal Article
Curious English words and phrases : the truth behind the expressions we use
'Cloud nine', 'at the drop of a hat', 'spitting image', 'mollycoddle', 'rigmarole', 'round robin', 'spill the beans', 'kick the bucket', 'balderdash' and 'touch wood'. There are so many curious words and phrases that we often use and yet haven't you ever wondered why we say them, where they come from and what they mean? Written by language expert Max Cryer, Curious Words and Phrases has all the answers behind some of the most interesting and perplexing words and expressions in the English language. Bulging with information, it's a useful reference book and the ideal gift for anyone curious about the words and phrases we use.
Book
Attention modulates perceptual learning of non-native-accented speech
Listeners readily adapt to variation in non-native-accented speech, learning to disambiguate between talker-specific and accent-based variation. We asked (1) which linguistic and indexical features of the spoken utterance are relevant for this learning to occur and (2) whether task-driven attention to these features affects the extent to which learning generalizes to novel utterances and voices. In two experiments, listeners heard English sentences (Experiment
1
) or words (Experiment
2
) produced by Spanish-accented talkers during an exposure phase. Listeners' attention was directed to lexical content (transcription), indexical cues (talker identification), or both (transcription + talker identification). In Experiment
1
, listeners' test transcription of novel English sentences spoken by Spanish-accented talkers showed generalized perceptual learning to previously unheard voices and utterances for all training conditions. In Experiment
2
, generalized learning occurred only in the transcription + talker identification condition, suggesting that attention to both linguistic and indexical cues optimizes listeners’ ability to distinguish between individual talker- and group-based variation, especially with the reduced availability of sentence-length prosodic information. Collectively, these findings highlight the role of attentional processes in the encoding of speech input and underscore the interdependency of indexical and lexical characteristics in spoken language processing.
Journal Article