The first part of this paper introduces the concept of digital humanities and the phases that some researchers note in the development of the humanities in new, digital media, as well as the role of digital humanities in the promotion of the marginalised literatures, particularly that written by women. The core example is the digital database Knjiženstvo, certain segments of which contain not only the data on the texts, but the digitised texts as well. In this paper, we pose the question on how databases can be involved in the creation of new knowledge at all educational levels. To this effect, we necessarily expand certain segments of the database to include those publications on which they already contain information. In relation to this, it has been observed that one of the greatest problems is the part of the database dealing with the periodicals – both women and feminist – and therefore, the second part of the paper is dedicated to this topic. We first analyze the terms women and feminist magazines, and afterwards, we consider the ways in which the materials from these periodicals could be gathered, classified and connected.
Many flights operate in different countries and aviation communication takes place mainly between non-native speakers of English. Unfortunately, real life professional discourse seems to go beyond its prescribed standardization. Moreover, it still happens that many languages are used simultaneously on the frequency. This paper investigates the matter of multilingual usefulness in global aviation communication. The author presents the current state of affairs and discusses whether or not operational personnel need to know how to speak multiple languages or if it is better to speak only prescribed Aeronautical English. Empirically based research is also presented. What matters in a given context and especially in a particular non-standard or emergency situation is the language used for professional communication, but in the aviation context it is not only the communication between parties involved that really counts. All the users of airspace should understand words uttered by their colleagues present at frequency in order to be able to correct wrong instructions or react in case of distress.
In India, the phenomenon of Hinglish has rapidly emerged from being a fashionable style of speech to a significant force instrumental in bringing about a major paradigm shift in social demography. Globalization and economic liberalization has served as catalysts to amplify this uniform communication code, which is currently blurring the linguistic barriers in a country speaking 780 dialects. Hinglish is redefining the cultural conventions in marketing/advertisement, Bollywood, and communication styles present in social media and the Internet. Its claim to be a proper language is substantiated by its acknowledgement on prestigious literary forums. While the concept is welcomed by both the marketplace and the masses as a beneficial symbiotic experience, it has also left the stakeholders of standard language, both Hindi and English, fretting and fuming. Amidst all the celebrations and concerns, the corpus of Hinglish is constantly widening and evolving because it is has been internalized, and not imposed, by the society as its own creation. The language accommodates diversity, lends flexibility, and suits the temperament of modern India. This paper studies how Hinglish has managed to seep into the very fabric of Indian society, restructuring the governing norms and practices. The paper also attempts to reflect how Hinglish is much more than just a language hybrid.
The following paper deals with the concept and typology of terminological synonyms in English and Czech, focusing on the official sport terms codified in English and/or Czech dictionaries. The analysis focuses on Anglicisms as terminological doublets, hyposynonyms, stylistic synonyms, and false friends. Results show that a high number of synonyms were generated by the process of transshaping or translating English terms into Czech. Our analysis suggests that there may be found three types of sports synonyms in English (real, quasi-, and pseudo- synonyms) and four main types in Czech (terminological doublets, Anglicisms as hyposynonyms, false friends, and stylistic synonyms). The use of synonyms is even more evident in modern or newly created sports; mass media and the accessibility of data through the Internet playing an essential role as they mediate an immense input of information to the target population.
The specificity of teaching and learning English for children with special educational needs is the result of the process of implementation of innovative tech-nologies for developing communication skills. Teaching methods are: brainstorming / ice breaking game /; video presentation / multimedia presentation /; doll show; frontal talk; solving crossword puzzles; individual work for the faster. The training is carried out in an innovative learning environment at the “Neofit Rilski” Primary School in Kilifarevo. The expected results of teaching and learning can be represented by the significantly higher annual achievement of students with special needs. Teaching requires the tea-cher to prepare the academic content on a scientific basis. The scientific basis of the English lesson involves the use of the Multiple Intelligence Theory. The interest in innovative training is strongly emphasized by students with special needs.
This paper examines six guides to the etymology of English, written for nonspecialist readers between 1887 and 2009. Four are by etymological lexicographers (two by W. W. Skeat and one each by Anatoly Liberman and Philip Durkin) and two by philologists with strong etymological interests (A. S. C. Ross and W. B. Lockwood). The paper seeks to present their contents, to compare them with each other, and to contextualize them both in the internal history and in the social history of scholarship
All the classifications of present-day English irregular verbs to be found in the most famous grammars basically do not differ considerably and, especially, consider them to be mere aggregates of irregularities.This paper, on the other hand, aims to suggest a different classification by applying the basic tenets of Natural Morphology. This allows the author to divide irregular verbs into microclasses according to two main parameters: (i) the number of bases and (ii) rhymes. The latter is especially important, since empirical evidence demonstrates that the basic relationship existing among paradigms and families of paradigms is the one based on morphotactic similarity, whereas semantic similarities are absolutely peripheral. The two parameters are eventually exploited to provide a further scale, i.e. that of morphotactic transparency and of base uniformity, which is fundamental to organise a hierarchy of suppletion.
This paper proposes to analyse ironic utterances in the British TV series Downton Abbey (Season One) by comparing the English source text (ST) irony found in the script of the film to its subtitled variant of the Hungarian target text (TT). First the literature of the domain is surveyed in order to draw attention to the difficulty of rendering irony in audiovisual subtitles which emphasises that, as a multidisciplinary area, it involves not only audio and visual, but also verbal and non-verbal factors. This section is followed by a brief survey of irony theories highlighting the incongruence factor of irony, which also needs to be rendered in the TT After offering an outline of the story, several examples of ironic utterances are discussed, applying the dynamic equivalence method.
The factors that influence English speakers to classify a consonant as ambisyllabic are explored in 581 bisyllabic words. The /b/ in habit, for example, was considered ambisyllabic when a participant chose hab as the first part of the word and bit as the second. Geminate spelling was found to interact with social variables; older participants and more educated speakers provided more ambisyllabic responses. The influence of word-level phonotactics on syllabification was also evident. A consonant such as the medial /d/ in standard is attested as the second consonant in the coda of many English words (e.g. lard), as well as in the single-consonant onset of many others; for this reason such consonants were often made ambisyllabic. This contrasts with the /n/ in standard, which is never the first consonant in a word-initial cluster (e.g. *ndorf) and, therefore, rarely made ambisyllabic in the experiment. Ambisyllabicity was also found more often when the vowel preceding the single medialconsonant was lax, or stressed, or when the medial-consonant was a sonorant rather than an obstruent. The idea that a stressed lax vowel in the first syllable conditions both the ambisyllabicity of the consonant and its geminate spelling is not supported.
This paper examines part of an experiment devoted to Polish English (hencefore PE) stress production. The experiment was conducted on sixteen adult Polish English speakers. The experimental lexical stratum that I used in the investigation was the list of sentences used in Archibald's (1998) and Waniek-Klimczak's (2002) experiments. A controlled reading list was recorded and then analyzed auditorily. The aim of the pilot study was to analyze the metrical structure of PE penultimate stress in longer consonant final words. Specifically, my goal was to explain why stress in PE is systematically located on the antepenult syllable in words ending in a consonant. This is unexpected from the point of view of both Polish (where stress is normally assigned to the penult syllable) and English (where in words of this type stress is assigned to the penult or the antepenult, depending on the weight of the penult syllable).
English has become the first global language of international com- munication during the last decades. It is dominant in many fields as science, technology, transportation, business and tourism and diplomacy. The European Union with law applicable directly on individuals is officially multilingual. English is, however, preferred in internal communication and in communication with national experts. National laws are closely related with particular states. Related discourse is therefore realized mostly in national language. Legal education and research are thus less anglicized than other university education and research. Nevertheless, increasing importance of international and supranational rules for harmonization and coordination, growing demand for comparison, pres- sure to publish in internationally recognized journals, Europe-wide research projects and rising numbers of exchange of students cause widespread resort to English also at schools of law. Unfortunately, English is language of countries with Anglo-American law (common law) which differs significantly from continental law (civil law) existing in most European and other countries. Therefore, it is difficult to find adequate English words for phenomena of civil law and to stabilize their use in international discourse.
The aim of the article is to describe – on the example of teaching English – the reductionistic character of the testing phenomenon. Global international tests (TOEFL and TOEIC) provide excellent arguments to critics of the phenomenon of “testology”, related to reducing the school’s identity and student identity to results of test. An excellent example of this phenomenon is Japanese society. In Japan, where English is considered the cultural and professional capital of individuals, the paradoxes (and absurdities) of testing find their best exemplification. At the same time, the fact that English is completely different from Japanese results in contextualizing language tests in different, sometimes unexpected, cultural aspects of life. In addition, the controversy surrounding the testing of the English language proficiency in Japan is related to the discussion about cultural imperialism. All these issues will be analysed in the article, not only in the Japanese context but also in relation to whole “testing culture”.
This paper investigates the interplay between the metrical structure and phonotactic complexity in English, a language with lexical stress and an elaborate inventory of consonant clusters. The analysis of a dictionary- and corpus-based list of polysyllabic words leads to two major observations. First, there is a tendency for onsetful syllables to attract stress, and for onsetless syllables to repel it. Second, the stressed syllable embraces a greater array of consonant clusters than unstressed syllables. Moreover, the farther form the main stress, the less likely the unstressed syllable is to contain a complex onset. This finding indicates that the ability of a position to license complex onsets is related to its distance from the prosodic head.
Although Sri Lanka was a site of colonization of the Portuguese, Dutch and (under the treaty of Amiens in 1802) British, it was the English language that had the strongest infl uence on the indigenous population of the island as the earlier colonizers were less interested in disseminating their culture. Taking into consideration the fact that English was established in Sri Lanka by missionaries and British officers, it can be assumed that the language brought to the island of Ceylon was the Standard English of the turn of the 19th century. Exploiting data from International Corpus of English – Sri Lanka and articles on Sri Lankan English, the present study contains a comparison of contemporary Sri Lankan English and the English of the period when the language was brought to the Island (early 19th century). Thus, an effort is made to show the conservative features of the language of the first British settlers, which survive in English spoken in contemporary Sri Lanka.
An explorative case study has been conducted at a small rural school in the north east of Thailand to investigate the pronunciation errors that primary school students make when reading English aloud. This paper illustrates the opportunities and challenges of employing speech recognition software in rural classrooms by using it with specifically designed audio-visual materials based on the Thai curriculum to identify English language reading and pronunciation difficulties. A comparison is made between this study and published literature.
The study of speech timing, i.e. the duration and speed or tempo of speech events, has increased in importance over the past twenty years, in particular in connection with increased demands for accuracy, intelligibility and naturalness in speech technology, with applications in language teaching and testing, and with the study of speech timing patterns in language typology. H owever, the methods used in such studies are very diverse, and so far there is no accessible overview of these methods. Since the field is too broad for us to provide an exhaustive account, we have made two choices: first, to provide a framework of paradigmatic (classificatory), syntagmatic (compositional) and functional (discourse-oriented) dimensions for duration analysis; and second, to provide worked examples of a selection of methods associated primarily with these three dimensions. Some of the methods which are covered are established state-of-the-art approaches (e.g. the paradigmatic Classification and Regression Trees, CART , analysis), others are discussed in a critical light (e.g. so-called ‘rhythm metrics’). A set of syntagmatic approaches applies to the tokenisation and tree parsing of duration hierarchies, based on speech annotations, and a functional approach describes duration distributions with sociolinguistic variables. Several of the methods are supported by a new web-based software tool for analysing annotated speech data, the Time Group Analyser.
Starting with the Transitivity Requirement hypothesis [the direct object counterpart of Extended Projection P rinciple (EPP)], we examine the development of cognate objects and cognate subjects in English. We show that English extended the range of both cognate objects - which are now also possible with activity/event nouns - and cognate subjects - cognate subjects became an option for impersonal verbs. However, we argue that a correlation between the development of cognate arguments and the changes in null arguments should be excluded, whereas the development of the cognate arguments appears to be related to aspectual changes.
Polish students often have problems identifying the contexts in which English epistemic adverbs such as arguably, conceivably, presumably can be used because their uses and functions tend to be culture- and language specific. In consequence, their repertoire of English epistemic adverbs is rather narrow. The aim of this paper is to establish whether the definitions offered by commonly used dictionaries are helpful in learning the meanings and uses of English epistemics. It demonstrates that while the meanings of epistemic verbs and adjectives are usually defined at length, the meanings of the corresponding adverbs are often described very briefly or even omitted.
Attitudes of language users to English in the international context certainly do not rank among newly studied subjects. One of the frequent caveats of the ongoing research, however, is that it mostly targets university students of English, which may provide a very skewed perspective. This study focuses on young Czech speakers of English who have studied or are studying other disciplines and uses an online survey to examine their attitudes to English pronunciation in general and to their own pronunciation, to various accents of English and also to exposure to model accents. Analyses of 145 respondents show that 70% of them would like to acquire a native-like accent (most frequently General British), even though most of them use English with other foreigners (and not native speakers). They prefer to be exposed to many different accents of English, native and non-native, and believe that learners should themselves choose which accent they want to regard as a model. One of the most important findings concerns the participants’ belief that pronunciation is teachable and that it is worth working on it; this should provide encouragement to teachers of English. In general, our results suggest that the ELF approach and the associated Lingua Franca Core concept do not seem to be relevant for young Czech users of English.
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