Linguistic Prefabrication: A Discourse Analysis Approach
This book presents an innovative exploration of linguistic prefabrication in the travel advertising discourse from a functional perspective. Most of the previous studies on prefabricated language have adopted a structural, systematic point of view. This study, however, aims at exploring its functions in discourse. The material examined here is the discourse of travel advertising, which has become one of the candidates for 'late modern discourse par excellence' and rarely been discussed before.
This book provides a collection of articles that reflect the current state of affairs in the blossoming field of World Englishes by bringing together several innovative synchronic and diachronic approaches. It contributes to the ongoing theoretical discussion concerning the criteria that make a low-frequency item represent an incipient change and examines the suitability of the sociolinguistics of globalisation theory for the study of non-traditional avenues for the spread of vernacular varieties of English (recent migrations, the entertainment industry, the web).
Two common beliefs in American society are that there is only one correct pronunciation and one correct spelling for each word, and that the meaning or meanings listed in "the dictionary" represent "correct" usage established by some incontrovertible authority. These views are convenient in that they enable parents to correct children, and they facilitate the assigning of qualitative values to students' spoken and written use of language. The "correct" pronunciation may vary within certain boundaries in a regional accent, but spelling and meaning are usually considered to be permanent.
Since the first edition was published in 1954, this outstanding work has consistently served as a comprehensive yet easy-to-follow guidebook to general American phonetics. Included are chapters dealing with the transcription of on-going speech, narrow transcription, normal and deviant allophones and information on how speech sounds are produced, as well as an examination of the linguistic principles that have come to play a prominent role in modern speech pathology. The application of phonemics and phonetics to the understanding of the problems of deviant speech and language, foreign accent, and dialect enhance reader comprehension in these areas.
This volume on developmental linguistics offers method and rationale for analyses of complex variation in British English and ancient Greek within the grammar--i.e. without regard to the distribution of language variants in geographical or social space. The book offers a host of grammatical (and social) reasons for accepting the beginnings of English as a French creole with Romance-like syntactic phenomena too involved to be viewed as borrowings, though disguised to casual observers by reason of the many Anglo-Saxon calques on French functor words.
