This book presents the state-of-the-art in research and empirical studies in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the semantic analysis of social media data. Over the past few years, online social networking sites have revolutionized the way we communicate with individuals, groups and communities, and altered everyday practices. The unprecedented volume and variety of user-generated content and the user interaction network constitute new opportunities for understanding social behavior and building socially intelligent systems.

This study explores the use of other languages, especially Latin, in medieval and Renaissance English drama. Until the medieval period Latin was regarded as the sacramental language of authority, but in the newly politicized linguistic arena of the late fourteenth century it became a symbol of the potential enemy from Rome.

It is quite commonplace for bilingual speakers to use two or more languages, dialects or varieties in the same conversation, without any apparent effort. The phenomenon, known as code-switching, has become a major focus of attention in linguistics. This concise and original study explores how, when and where code-switching occurs.

Whys & Therefores aids the reader in arriving at generalizations for the shape of the English language: words, grammar, meaning, sound and spelling. The format adopted throughout is that of a light-hearted ongoing Socratic dialogue between a mentor and a pupil. The intended effects of such activity are: awareness of what it means to 'know' a language; reliance upon native-language intuition; discovery of what one didn't know that one already 'knows' about the language; use of ungrammaticality as an investigative tool; healthy questioning of received facts about language from so-called experts; and usefulness of language play.

This book presents an in-depth study of English as spoken in two major anglophone Caribbean territories, Jamaica and Trinidad. Based on data from the International Corpus of English, it focuses on variation at the morphological and syntactic level between the educated standard and more informal educated spoken usage. Dagmar Deuber combines quantitative analyses across several text categories with qualitative analyses of transcribed text passages that are grounded in interactional sociolinguistics and recent approaches to linguistic style and identity.