1,721,205 research outputs found
Preface
No full textThe volume presents a collection of research papers on how to foster the learning and teaching of pragmatic phenomena, as well as on how to administer tests that assess pragmatic competence in second/foreign language education with regard to several target languages. The topics investigated include: speech acts; computer-mediated communication; conversation analysis; pragmatic, intercultural and emotional competence; native and non-native performance; data collection and instructional methods; needs analysis; and syllabus design and materials development
Gian Luigi De Rosa, Francesca Bianchi, Antonella De Laurentiis, and Elisa Perego (eds.). 2014. Translating humor in audiovisual texts
Full text linkreview of Gian Luigi De Rosa, Francesca Bianchi, Antonella De Laurentiis, and Elisa
Perego (eds.). 2014. Translating humor in audiovisual text
Investigating zero-derivation in a VetMed/BioTech English corpus
No full textZero-Derivation, more commonly known as conversion, has been defined by many scholars (Bauer 1983; Pyles and Algeo 1993; Štekauer and Lieber 2005) as a word-formation process by which a word, belonging to one word-class, is transferred to another word-class without any concomitant change of form. It is a highly prolific mechanism for the production of new words, since there is no restriction on the form that can undergo conversion in English.
Our paper deals with a corpus of factsheets created ad hoc over three academic years for teaching purposes in the domain-specific sectors of English for Veterinary Medicine and Biotechnology, where zero-derivation, as well as its sub-type, functional shift, commonly occur. In fact, it is not unusual in such texts to deal with terms which, from both a morphosyntactic and a lexical point of view, may seem transparent and lead to a predicted meaning; on the contrary, they represent large pitfalls at first sight. Among the many examples we have catalogued over time, we have decided to focus on some of the most peculiar occurrences, under a quali-quantitative perspective – the latter being processed via WordSmith Tools.
In addition to classical words that go through zero-derivation in General English as well, such as head / to head, to fly / a fly, to cut / a cut, to call / a call, better / to better, wrong / to wrong, mastering knowledge of word-classes is undoubtedly necessary in VetMed/Biotech domains in order to recognize that, in sentences like: (1) “Noncultivable, apparently nonpathogenic, isolates have also been detected in wild salmonids.” (source: CFSPH, “Infectious Salmon Anemia”, March 2010), isolates acts as a noun, and not as a verb; (2) “An influenza pandemic occurs when a new influenza virus emerges and spreads around the world, and most people do not have immunity.” (source: WHO, “What is a pandemic?”, February 2010), pandemic is a noun, and not an adjective; (3) “The first human vaccines against viruses were based using weaker or attenuated viruses to generate immunity.” (source: www.historyofvaccines.org), human is not an adjective, but a noun; and so on. A section of this paper shall be devoted to investigating functional shift – i.e., that sub-process underlying, for example, the increasingly widespread use of the term bacteria as a collective noun rather than as the plural form of bacterium [e.g.: “Essentially, a bacteria or virus simply won’t have enough eligible hosts to establish a foothold and will eventually die out entirely.” (source: http://www.publichealth.org)].
This paper aims at proving that, even in the scientific languages of Veterinary Medicine and Biotechnology, English implements word-formation mechanisms, thus resulting in creative transformations in morphology, syntax and meaning – most interestingly when such features intertwine with figurative language devices such as metaphors and metonymies, as well as the lexical issue of false friends in translating between English and Italian and vice-versa
Teaching compliments and insults in the EFL class through film clips
No full textThe purpose of this contribution is to endorse the use of film clips to teach aspects of interactional dynamics and to foster multimodal awareness in the foreign language classroom. After establishing the feasibility of using film dialogue as a model for face-to-face conversation, I will consider the case of some conversational routines, namely complimenting and insulting. In particular, I will suggest ways of exploiting some film material by means of a multimodal transcription that integrates linguistic analysis with information encoded in nonlinguistic channels (e.g., the technical aspects related to framing and editing and the nonverbal signals of communication expressed through kinesics and proxemics). In the latter part, I will suggest different audio and video combinations in order to draw attention to the multimodal dimension of meaning making, highlighting both linguistic and cultural aspects of the two conversational routines under investigation
La filosofia della cura in carcere: il dialogo socratico come strumento di emancipazione
No full text
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
The variability of Compliment Responses: Italian and German data. Chapter XVI
No full textThis study aims firstly to analyse differences and analogies between Italian and German in terms of answering to compliments. The investigation is based on a wide corpus of Italian and German compliment responses, classified on the base of a typologization we postulated for our research. A second goal of the study is to demonstrate how compliment varies along the axes of the so-called dia-levels, because CRs are sensitive to geographical area, gender, topics, illocutionary force; for this purpose we use authentic data we have collected in these last years. We start by presenting our corpora, defining the speech act of complimenting and describing our CRs categorization framework used to analyse and classify our data. As a second step, we compare German and Italian native speakers’ reactions to compliments according to their degree of acceptance and their topic. A particular attention has been deserved to the diatopic variation in Italy. In the last paragraph we summarize the most relevant findings of our study
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