This textbook introduces undergraduate students of language and linguistics to the basic ideas, insights, and techniques of contemporary semantic theory. The book starts with everyday observations about word meaning and use primarily and then gradually zooms in on the question of how speakers manage to meaningfully communicate with phrases, sentences, and texts they have never come across before. Extensive English examples provide ample illustration.
In recent years language learning has been increasingly viewed by some SLA researchers as an essentially social-psychological process in which the role of a wider sociocultural context should not be marginalized. This volume offers a valuable contribution to this growing body of research by providing theoretical considerations and empirical research data on themes such as the development of intercultural communicative competence, the role of English as a lingua franca in intercultural communication, and the place of cultural factors in SLA theorizing, research, secondforeign language teaching and teacher training.
English causative constructions with cause, get, have and make are often mistakenly presented as (quasi-)synonymous and more or less interchangeable. This book demonstrates the value of corpus linguistics in identifying the syntactic, semantic, lexical and stylistic features that are distinctive for each of these constructions. It also underlines the usefulness of providing corpus studies with a solid theoretical foundation by showing how corpus linguistics can be fruitfully combined with cognitive linguistics, which is used both as a starting point for the analysis (top-down approach) and as a framework within which to interpret the corpus results (bottom-up approach).
Leyton's Process Grammar has been applied by scientists and engineers in many disciplines including medical diagnosis, geology, computer-aided design, meteorology, biological anatomy, neuroscience, chemical engineering, etc.
