1,720,969 research outputs found
Teaching funerary archaeology through a foreign language: a proposal for a balanced content and language integrated learning (CLIL)-based course
No full textCombining different technologies in a Funerary Archaeology Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) course
No full textAt the interface of onomastics and phraseology. Multiword units as proper names - proper names as 'common' phrasal units
No full textThis paper discusses areas of transfer and of overlap between the realm of proper names and that of ‘common units’ of language. In particular, we illustrate two types of transfer which were found to occur in Italian, both in relation to phraseological units. Firstly, we look at the way in which standard multiword units, both lexical and sentence-level, can function as names and, especially, titles. Secondly, we show how well-known titles, especially of books and films, can be made to function as ‘common’ phrasal units, rather than making direct reference to the titles in question. In both cases, we comment on any eventual changes made to the usual form of the phrase. All examples quoted have been taken from a corpus of contemporary written Italian
Considerations emerging from a frequency study of multiword units in a corpus of contemporary written Italian
No full textIn this article we discuss the notion of corpus frequency as applied to multiword units. Most commonly, corpus frequency data regards single word forms, mainly because such data is very easy to obtain. It would be much more useful, however, to have access to information regarding the relative frequency of all units of meaning or function in a given language. That is, frequency data should be available for both single-word and multi-word units, and be sense-differentiated where homonymy exists. Such information would play an important role in contributing to the overall description of a language, in making cross-corpus and cross-language comparisons, and in providing the basis for other computational tasks.
In the present paper we discuss some of the major problems involved in drawing up frequency figures for multiword units, and then proceed to present a case study of how partial frequency data was arrived at for a corpus of written Italian. We also make cross-corpus comparisons, notably with a typologically similar corpus of English
An English grammar and a bilingual glossary acting as complementary tools for a CLIL-based course
No full textMany hands make light work: Collaborative CLIL Activities for university courses in Medieval funerary Archaeology
Full text linkThis paper describes the activities performed by the students of the course of funerary archaeology held at the Division of Palaeopathology of Pisa University in collaboration with the Institute for Computational Linguistics (ILC) of the National Research Council (CNR) in Pisa in the period April-June 2014. The lessons, which used a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approach, were aimed at studying the funerary beliefs and burial practices in Italy and England in the Middle Ages. The 2014 course followed on from the courses of the year 2012 (focused on the more general issue of taphonomy; primary and secondary burials; single, double, or multiple burials), and 2013 (which examined the world of the ancient Romans and their burial customs of cremation and inhumation). The lessons were conducted by using extracts from self-contained specialized texts that were simple to read and that offered the basic concepts of medieval funerary archaeology. The
students were supported by a reference text for funerary archaeology, which established the correct nomenclature to use when describing bodies, grave goods and tombs. Powerpoint slide presentations helped students break up the monotony of the text work and made the material more interesting and engaging. The slides were used to illustrate different types of burials in filled or empty spaces; the position of burials in both rural and urban environments; the disposition of the limbs in the burial; the rise of the Monasteries in the early Middle Ages and of the religious Orders of the Dominicans and Franciscans in the late Middle Ages. Each student was responsible for researching and reporting on a particular topic, and was supported by the use of information and communication techniques. Particular attention was devoted to the Books of Hours, important illuminated medieval manuscripts (containing psalms, short prayers and biblical quotations) that marked the different parts of the day and that were specifically composed for wealthy people. Classroom activities ranged from the simpler multi-matching and gap-filling exercises to the more complex tasks of providing definitions for given words, creating mind-maps, enriching a bilingual English-Italian glossary and providing contextualized
examples for an English grammar book. Educational videos from the BBC or other channels and pertaining to the topics treated during the lessons were projected each time and were followed by direct questioning and more general conversation, to help students gain proficiency in oral communication. In the last three years, the Italian students from Pisa University have been working in collaboration with those of Ohio University on an excavation project carried out at the Field School in Medieval Archaeology and Bioarchaeology at Badia Pozzeveri (Lucca, Italy), to which the prestigious International journal SCIENCE dedicated a special issue and cover in December 2013. Finally, multidisciplinary elements were also included in the courses, by exploiting the information extracted from videos related to disciplines other than funerary archaeology, for example a BBC Channel 4 video describing the British meals of the day, the origins of which date back to medieval times
Students’ partecipation in an Archaeoanthropology course using a content and language integrated learning (CLIL) methodology
No full textIdiom variation in Italian and English: Two corpus-based studies
No full textThis article reports on two parallel but independent studies of idiom variation in corpora — one of Italian and one of English. In the Italian study, 324 idiomatic expressions were looked for in a corpus of 16 million words, while the English study investigated more than 2,800 idioms in an 18-million word corpus. A description is given of the search techniques employed to locate instances of variation.
We present our findings by first describing the variation types common to both languages and thereafter examining cases where variation seemed to be wholly or predominantly language specific. Many similarities were found to exist between the two languages, and language specific variation could often be related to more general language specific features. We also comment on the overall frequency of idiom variation, which was found to be very similar in the two studies. In our concluding remarks we suggest that contrastive idiom analysis of the sort carried out, could and should be undertaken between other language pairs, and that the resulting interlingual descriptions would be of use in practical applications such as second language learning and computational tasks
Looking for pre-selected multiword units in an untagged corpus of written Italian: maximizing the potential of the search program DBT
No full textIn the course of research being carried out in the field of bilingual phraseology, the Italian Reference Corpus (IRC) was used as a potential source of contextualized examples for previously selected multiword units. In all, about 2000 items were looked for. These included both multiword lexical units and complete utterances. Before discussing the search program used and search techniques employed, it should be pointed out that the IRC is an untagged corpus. The user has no automatic help of a syntactic, semantic or other nature; immediate access is available only to raw individual words, or rather character strings. For the user interested in locating multiword units, the resultant intrinsic problems may be divided into two types. Firstly, basing one\u27s search on individual word forms (as opposed to looking for phrases which have in some way been tagged as such) will often result in a certain amount of irrelevant material. Secondly, since many phraseological units are subject to a greater or lesser amount of variation, it may as a consequence be difficult to find all occurrences. In information science the terms precision and recall would be used with regard to these two problems. Jeremy Clear explains precision and recall in the following way
A corpus-based study of Italian idiomatic phrases: from citation forms to 'real-life' occurrences
Full text linkIn the current paper we present a typological description of the alternative forms and variations which Italian idiomatic phrases were found to take in a corpus of contemporary written Italian. We were concerned above all with lexical variation, both regularly occurring and occasional, not with the syntactic flexibility of idioms. Flexible search parameters were used in order to locate as many variations as possible, including alternative lexical components, shortened forms of idioms, adaptation of underlying metaphors, and alternative syntactic realizations. We relate our findings to lexicographical description
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