Language demonstrates structure while also showing considerable variation at all levels: languages differ from one another while still being shaped by the same principles; utterances within a language differ from one another while exhibiting the same structural patterns; languages change over time, but in fairly regular ways. This book focuses on the dynamic processes that create languages and give them their structure and variance.
The authors show that the best way to develop proficiency in translating is by making students aware of the nature of translation as a problem-solving tool. Through discussion backed by concrete examples and practical applications, predominantly in translating French to English, students will acquire the skills necessary to deal intelligently with a wide range of translation problems. Areas covered include economic journalism, poetry, theater, and film subtitling, as well as consumer manuals and scientific and technical texts.
Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk among Friends
This revised edition of Deborah Tannen's first discourse analysis book, Conversational Style--first published in 1984--presents an approach to analyzing conversation that later became the hallmark and foundation of her extensive body of work in discourse analysis, including the monograph Talking Voices, as well as her well-known popular books You Just Don't Understand, That's Not What I Meant!, and Talking from 9 to 5, among others.
The theory of signifying (significs), formulated and introduced by Victoria Welby for the first time in 1890s, is at the basis of much of 20th-century linguistics, as well as in other language and communication sciences such as sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, translation theory and semiotics. Indirectly, the origins of approaches, methods and categories elaborated by analytical philosophy, Wittgenstein himself, Anglo-American speech act theory, and pragmatics are largely found with Victoria Lady Welby. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that Welby is the ""founding mother"" of semiotics.
This book introduces the most important problems of reference and considers the solutions that have been proposed to explain them. Reference is at the centre of debate among linguists and philosophers and, as Barbara Abbott shows, this has been the case for centuries. She begins by examining the basic issue of how far reference is a two place (words-world) or a three place (speakers-words-world) relation.
