Located on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea, Latvia has had a turbulent past. Its larger neighbors -- Russia, Germany, Poland, Sweden -- all occupied this area of the Baltic littoral at different times in the past, but it was not until the twentieth century that Latvia emerged as an independent country. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Latvia, together with the other two Baltic states, Estonia and Lithuania, regained independence that they had already had between the two World Wars. Plakans' intention here is to offer a stepping stone towards the eventual creation of a work presenting the "significant core" of Latvian history in English.
Morphosyntactic Persistence in Spoken English: A Corpus Study at the Intersection of Variationist Sociolinguistics, Psycholinguistics, and Discourse Analysis
Language users are creatures of habit with a tendency to re-use morphosyntactic material that they have produced or heard before. In other words, linguistic patterns and tokens, once used, persist in discourse. The present book is the first large-scale corpus analysis to explore the determinants of this persistence, drawing on regression analyses of a variety of functional, discourse-functional, cognitive, psycholinguistic, and external factors. The case studies investigated include the alternation between synthetic and analytic comparatives, between the s-genitive and the of-genitive, between gerundial and infinitival complementation, particle placement, and future marker choice in a number of corpora sampling different spoken registers and geographical varieties of English.
This book represents a new direction at the interface between the fields of stylistics and corpus linguistics, namely the use of a corpus methodology to investigate the ways in which people's words and thoughts are presented in written narratives. A 260,000 word electronic corpus of late 20th century written texts, including fiction, news reports and (auto)biographies is analysed by the authors, providing a detailed account of new theoretical insights, comparisons between different text types and detailed accounts of individual texts.
Synopsis Examines the overriding themes found in literature. This approach particularly helps students build critical thinking skills by making connections between thematically-similar works of literature, as well as providing a more global perspective by comparing and contrasting works from around the world.
The possibility of expressing negation is a very basic property of human language. All natural languages possess it. However, there is a certain amount of variation in the linguistic means employed for this purpose. This variation is not only found between different languages but also between the various diachronic stages within one language.
