linguistica inglese - approffondimento da corso linguistica generale, Schemi e mappe concettuali di Linguistica Generale

Scarica linguistica inglese - approffondimento da corso linguistica generale e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Linguistica Generale solo su Docsity! UNDERSTANDING AND MASTERING WORDS Core vocabulary and Wordlist How many words do learners of English need to know? The same number of words as a large dictionary (e.g. 54000 word families)? The same number as a native speaker (e.g. 20000 word families for a university graduate)? Are all the words are equally useful? What kind of words do we need to know? But what is meant by word family? Word + its derived forms, which all are different lexemes (e.g. admissable, admit, admittance, ecc.); Word + its inflected forms, which all represent the same lexeme (e.g. play, played, playing, ecc.). We should be familiar with the core vocabulary, that is to say those words which support the basic communication. The core vocabulary consists of the essential words, which are used very frequently and are shared by adult speakers. Are the most frequent words lexical or grammatical? Grammatical words Classes of lexical words -> nouns, lexical verbs, adjectives, adverbs -> in general lexical words are also called content words because they express content and they are open word classes because there is an infinite number of words (also called NAVA words = Noun Adjective ecc.). Classes of grammatical words -> pronouns, auxiliary verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, determiners -> in general grammatical words are also called function words because they express links in the message and they are close word classes because there is a finite number of words. The is the most frequent word both in speech and in writing (it accounts the 7% of the words). There is a list of words, which is called the General Service List (GLS) and contains the 2000 most frequent words. Although it is rather old (1953), it is still the best available list of words of “general service” for learners of English as a foreign language. The features of the first 1000 words -> more than 80% are of Germanic origin, they are often monosyllabic The features of the first 2000 words -> 34% of Germanic origin and the polysyllabic words increase The features of the first 3000 words -> a further drop in Germanic origin occurs. The 2000 word families of the General Service List represent 80% of coverage of written text (the percentage of a written text you can understand) and 96% coverage of informal spoken text. This is a lot but still not enough to infer the meaning of unknown words. The minimun target of foreign language learners is represented by between 2-3000 word families which is the number of words necessary for productive use in speaking and writing; and between 3-5000 words, which is the number of words necessary for receptive use. Ex: Vocabulary in EAP (English for Academic Purposes) – General Service List. Which vocabulary do we need beside the 2000 most frequent words? A partial answer is given by the Academic Word List (AWL), which conteins 570 word families commonly found in academic texts. How were the words selected? They compile a corpus and they observe which words occur most frequently with software. The words occured in a large corpus of written academic texts from different disciplines and appeared over 100 times, so they will be met a reasonable number of times. These words have to occur at least 19 times in each academic domain and should not be the same as the 2000 most frequent words that appear on the GLS. For whom is the AWL useful? For learners, especially for students who study English at a tertiary level (=di livello universitario). Indeed, AWL contains non-subject specific vocabulary that students of any discipline need to master. The words contained in GLS and those in AWL account for nearly 90% of academic texts. As well as thes general acdemic words, EAP students would also need to know the specifc words related to their subjects (around 5% of the words in an academic text) and some of the less frequent words used in English (about 5%). How is the AWL organized? AWL is divided into 10 sublists -> Each word in italics is the most frequently occurring member of the word family in the Academic Corpus. For example, analysis is the most common form of the word family analyse. British and American spelling is included in the word families, so contextualise and contextualize are both included in the family context. Sublist 1 contains the most common words in the AWL. Sublist 2 contains the next most common words, and so on. There are 60 families in each sublist, except for sublist 10 which has 30. https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/lals/resources/academicwordlist/information/thesublists -> link How can the AWL be used? Studying words from the varoius word lists -> rely on frequency, starting with sublist 1 and moving on or identifying the most frequent word in each sublist; avoid interference (quando si imparano parole, è bene imparare parole diverse, per esempio non tutte con la stessa lettera iniziale); do some exercises based on AWL (link -> http://www.uefap.com/vocab/vocfram.htm -> exercises / selection / AWL. How do you study/practise words -> Incidental learning or Active study of the new words? Which one is more important? Researchs have shown that incidental learning is the most important strategy, for example with extensive reading and listening or partecipating to formal classroom activities (especially in the case of children) without doing a conscious effort, but not sufficient. So it’s necessary to complement the incidental learning with an active study of isolated words -> studying from wordlists (decontextualised), retrieving words (through word cards, vocabulary notebook) so recalling the link between form and meaning, spacing the number of repetitions so that words are fixed in the long term-memory, processing words (=using techniques which are based on various associations), looking out for collocations and grammatical patterns when reading (=noticing -> when you read a text tou notice the collocations, for example underlining them). WORD ASSOCIATIONS Esercizio / Esempi green -> grass -> the two words tend to co-occur; body -> soul -> the two words are opposites dead -> body -> the two words tend to co-occur sell -> goods -> the two words tend to co-occur Words do not relate to one another only through the network of sense relations. However, words keep company with other words (cit. the linguist J. R. Firth). According to the linguist Sinclair, there are two principles at work in language: - The open choice principle -> sentences can be thought of as a series of empty slot, speakers choose how to fill each slot and each choice is a separate one -> this is the traditional view of language, taught in many pedagogical grammars, but actually it isn’t true. - The idiom principle -> words do not occur at random in texts; indeed many words are not chosen individually, but in groups and there are regularities in how words occur (es: of course) -> chains of language, because the choice of a word dictates the choice of another word; this principle is pervasive in language and it also accounts for collocations. Collocation -> habitual, regular combination of two or more words; they sound right/idiomatic to native speakers. They are an example of syntagmatic relations. There are different types of collocations: - Free combinations/Unrestricted collocations -> common lexical items (es: fat + all the parts of the body, all the animals, people) which co-occur rather freely with a wide range of items (closer to the open choice principle). - Semi-fixed expressions -> given a word, there is some degree of predictability of the others (es: to protect/promote/safeguard sb’s interests); we can vary these expression<s – indeed we can substitute given words with others (es: in some cases vs in some instances), we can make changes in word-order (es: to set fire to sth vs to set sth on fire, but + substitution) or we can insert other words (es: vested interest vs vested financial/political interest). Here the meaning is fully predictable from the single words (between the two principles). - Frozen collocations (fixed or unique) -> collocations which are totally restricted in their combinability and wa cant make any change; es: he shrugged his shoulders = alzare le spalle (closer to the idiom principle). Why learn collocations? Words are stored in our brains in collocations and it’s easier to remember language in chunks rather than as single words. In this way your language will sound more natural. How can collocations be learnt? Trying to recognise them (noticing), treating them as blocks of language and writing down some collocates when learning words. Revising them constantly and practising them in context. Arranging them by topic or by a particular word. Using a learner’s dictionary. Phraseological Phenomena Es: Two wrongs don't make a right; Es: No man is an island; Es: The pen is mightier than the sword; Es: When in Rome, do as the romans do  All these example are proverbs, which are usually based on repetitions, on images. Es: See you later; have a good day (the social situation is saying goodbye); Es: Good morning how are you doing  the expressions we use in social situations rely heavily on pragmatic idioms, on prefabricated language. Es: Let me start with; Es: in other words; Es: for example; Es: in conclusion  they are all discourse organisers, that is to say multi-word used to structure discourse. Es: make a song and dance (= senza spargere la voce); Es: go out; Es: spill the beans (=vuotare il sacco)  these are idioms, that is to say expressions longer than a word and shorter than a sentence whose meaning cannot be derived from the sum of the meanings of its components. Es: to and fro; es: ups and downs; es: bed and breakfast; es: fish and chips; es: sick and tired (=stufa marcia); es: home and dry -> these are binomials, that is to say particular types of idioms made up of two (or more) fixed elements connected by and. Es: happy as lark (=felice come una Pasqua); es: as English/American as a pie; es: drink like fish (=bere come una spugna, come un cammello); eat like a horse (=mangiare come un lupo, come un maiale); es: as mad as a hatter -> they are all similes, which are stereotypical comparisons. Collocations are studied by phraseology, a branch of lexicology. Should speakers use fixed expressions? They could create a sense of community between people who understand them, but at the same time it excludes people who are not very fluent in that language. Kachru’s model: - ENL -> English as Native Language -> inner circle -> es: Usa, Uk - ESL -> English as Second Language -> outer circle -> es: India, Nigeria -> in this case English is learnt and also used in some official occasions - EFL -> English as Foreign Language -> expanding circle -> es: China, Russia, Brazil -> in this case English is studied at school and is spoken as a foreign language - ELF -> English as Lingua Franca -> lingua franca is a common language which enables communication among speakers who don’t share the same mother tongue -> in this case English is used to communicate across the circles English as lingua franca is an important issue nowadays -> the basic idea within the lingua france movement is that English does no longer belong just to native speakers of English, but it belongs to all speakers of English, so it’s a global asset which belongs to all users of English irrispective of their nationalities. English is considered as a language which is no longer linked to a single culture. The consequences of this are: - non-native speakers are granted the right to appropriate the language and shape it - English may deviate from native speaker norms, provided that the users’ communicative purposes are achieved - communicative effectiveness becomes more important than native-like command of English. Idiomaticity is a characteristic of ENL and it can cause problems for ELF users -> a scholar, Barbara Seidlhofer, talks about unilateral idiomaticity (if there are two speakers, one speaker uses an expression which is not understood by the other speaker, possibly an ELF speaker and this leads the communication to break down) which may derive from cultural loading, opacity, lexico-grammatical complexity or a combination of these. An example of cultural loading is rhyming slang originated in mid-19th century in the East End of London, maybe because of a linguistic accident, a game or a language created on purpose to confuse non-locals, or maybe to maintain a sense of community, or also because it was used by vendors in the marketplace or by criminals in order not to be understood -> es: current bun (instead of sun); es: frog and toad (instead of road). There are expressions which are opaque -> es: a seasonal blue Moon (=ogni morte di papa) refers to an astrological phenomenon. An example of lexico-grammatical complexity is a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush (=meglio un uovo oggi che una gallina domani). Research has explored the role of idiomatic expressions in ELF and it was found that idiomaticity is very important when ELF speakers interact, buti t occurs in a different way from interaction in native-speakers. ELF speakers co-construct idioms in interaction so idiomaticity is not so much a question of using a fixed expression, but speakers coin new idiomatic expressions on the basis of fixed expressions drawing on both the idiom principle and the open choice principle; it means that idioms in ELF can vary from their ENL equivalents -> es: we should wake up any dogs here the speaker doesn’t use the fixed expression let the sleeping dog lie (=non svegliare il can che dorme) but he re-awakens it and produces a new metaphorical use of language. Methaphors in ELF may be: - entirely novel - formally related to existing English idioms – formally variation of the expression (the ex. up) - created with other language idioms. The co-creation of idioms in ELF settings may enhance cooperation for mutual understanding and foster (=favorire) a mutual affective space. WORD TERMINOLOGY The number of words in a sentence varies according to what counts as a word -> lexeme/lexical item is a very useful term which also applies to word combinations. This shows that the term word alone is not enough and we need more refined concepts. A lexeme is an abstract unit of vocabulary which underlies (=sta alla base) different variants of the same word (word-forms = concrete realizations) -> es: speak, speaking, spoke, spoken -> speak is the lexeme and the other three are other forms of the same word. Technical definition by Bauer -> lexemes, which are abstracts, require particular word-forms to realize them in any given context and the lexeme then encompasses all the word-forms which realize that particular lexeme. Headword/Lemma -> the citation form of a word, i.e. the form which is conventionally chosen to represent a lexeme in a dictionary Entry -> an independent lexical unit listed in a dictionary in alphabetical order; it consists of the headword (printed in bold type) and information about it Oxford English Dictionary is the most authoritative dictionary of English -> video seen during the lesson (30/10/20) and answered questions about it Murray was an extraordinary man because he was a school teacher from Scotland and he could speak more than 40 different languages fluently. His idea was to create a dictionary that was bigger, better than any other before and every reader was invited to send information and quotations about words. So readers worked as detectives to contribute to the dictionary, because they collected words and quotations from various sources, not only from literary works as in the past, but also from scientific journals, wills (=testamenti), receipts. In Oxford the editors had to check the incoming slips from readers; the presence of quotations was so important in the dictionary because they are example of usage, they show how a word can be used in a context. The slips contained the headword and the quotation. Not only academics but also words which go together), information which had only been sketchily covered in previous dictionaries. Under his guidance, Professor Sinclair’s team also developed a full-sentence defining style, which not only gave the user the sense of a word, but showed that word in grammatical context. When the first Collins COBUILD Dictionary of English was published in 1987, it revolutionized dictionaries for learners, completely changing approaches to dictionary-writing, and leading to a new generation of Corpus- driven dictionaries and reference materials for English language learners. Professor Sinclair worked on the Collins COBUILD range of titles until his retirement, when he moved to Florence, Italy and became president of the Tuscan Word Centre, an association devoted to promoting the scientific study of language. He remained interested in dictionaries until his death, and the Collins COBUILD range of dictionaries remains a testament to his revolutionary approach to lexicography and English language learning. The Collins Corpus -> The Collins Corpus is an analytical database of English with over 4.5 billion words. It contains written material from websites, newspapers, magazines and books published around the world, and spoken material from radio, TV and everyday conversations. New data is fed into the Corpus every month, to help the Collins dictionary editors identify new words and meanings from the moment they are first used. All COBUILD dictionaries are based on the information we find in the Collins Corpus. The full Corpus contains 4.5 billion words. The Bank of English™ is a subset of 650 million words from a carefully chosen selection of sources, to give a balanced and accurate reflection of English as it is used today. Our lexicographers use the Bank of English™ every day, and they use the full Collins Corpus to check more widely for extra information. Because the Collins Corpus is so large, we can look at lots of examples of how people really use the words. The data tells us how words are used, what they mean, which words are used together, and how often words are used. This information on frequency helps us decide which words to include in the COBUILD dictionaries. All of the examples in COBUILD dictionaries are examples of real English, taken from the Corpus. The Collins Corpus lies at the heart our publishing for learners of English and you can be confident that COBUILD will show you what you need to know to be able to communicate easily and accurately in English. When a dictionary editor wants to add a new word to COBUILD, they search the Corpus for every example of the word. The word appears on the computer screen in a long list of sentences and the editor can arrange the lines in different ways depending on what they want to look at. For example, let’s look at the phrase 'in the cloud', and how its meaning has changed over time. 1990-1999: 100% of all examples of 'in the cloud' in the written Subcorpus relate either to meteorology or clouds of dust, smoke or alike. Below are some examples from the Corpus with their sources. 'Sometimes there was a break in the cloud and you could see for miles.' (Sunday Times)... 'Chondrules [...] probably started out as globs of molten rock in the cloud of dust and gas that gave birth to the Solar System.' (New Scientist) 2005-2009: More than 60% of the entries found in the Corpus now relate to computing. '...his goal is to create a kind of Windows in the cloud.' (The Economist) 'Will information I store in the cloud be secure?' (Computing) 'Since the data is stored in the cloud, there 's no risk of data loss.' (Financial Mail, South Africa). The compound 'cloud computing' didn’t even exist in the 1990-1999 Corpus, but there are more than 500 hits in the 2005-2009 Corpus. 'The attraction of cloud computing is evident for a small startup business lacking the finances to develop and maintain IT infrastructures in-house. (Computing) ...companies that consider cloud computing need to also understand the legal implications of losing access to such a service.' (Computing) '...with cloud computing, it is much harder to know where information is and who is controlling it.' (Computing) '...cloud computing lets companies have someone else run their software remotely for a monthly or annual fee, with users accessing the programs over live Internet connections.' (Denver Post) This shows that the word 'cloud' was mainly used in its meteorological sense before 2005. In recent years, 'cloud', in the sense of web-based storage for files, has become frequent along with new collocations ('cloud computing') and new phrases ('in the cloud'). Corpus (pl. Corpora) is a large collection of texts assumed to be representative of a given language. In order to be representative of a language various texts types and genres need to be included, such as newspapers, tv programmes, oral texts, etc. It can be examined with collocational software programmes to get information about language. Slide that shows an example of concordances aligned by the node word (in the centre) -> these word lines come from every possible source included in the corpus. The system retrieves (=recupera) each sentence in which the word (ex:challenge) is used. These concordances give us information about how a language is used in real life. In the past, when lexicographers didn’t have corpora they had to rely on examples, taken manually from works and on their own intuition. Initially, lexicophers didn’t work on computers screens but on printouts (huge piece of paper where concordance lines were printed). Corpora are used not only to compile dictionaries, but also to study a specific genre. Slide that shows the word which appear most frequently in the co-text of the node word (ex: success) and the numbers highlighted in red tell us the position in which these words occur most frequently -> this is what we can do by using a collocational software. We can align concordances by collocate -> in the slide we can see that face appears very often in the co- text of challenge but not always in the same position. When working with corpora, it is essential to observe data without preconceptions about meanings, functions, collocability, grammar, importance of target words. Lexicographers should merely look at the data, look at how words are actually used. They make it possible to observe how words are actually used and to process more data, finding what is central and typical. Corpora make it possible to see the most frequent words and phrases, which need the most detailed treatment and the most frequent senses of words, which have to be put first in dictionaries (ex: spring -> 1.season, 2.verb). Examples are taken from the corpus on which a specific dictionary is based; this means that examples are authentic (=not invented/contrived) and they provide encoding information. Ex: defining the word ambassador we may find the German ambassador to Poland and this provides us with encoding information. 6The relevant information to be included in the definitions is selected from the corpus -> ex: in the definition an amnesty is an official pardon granted to a group of prisoners by the state we can see that the verb used with amnesty is to grant. On the basis of corpora it is possible to select a restricted vocabulary for explanation, since after examining a corpus we can see a list of the most frequent words, namely the words which may be used to define all the other words. The Cobuild is the first of a new generation of dictionaries -> by the late 1990s all major English learner’s dictionaries relied on compora and used computational techniques for extracting information. ONLINE DICTIONARIES There is a very high number of online dictionaries, therefore we cannot think to present a complete catalogue -> we present some examples to present the various types of dictionaries available online. Comparing dictionaries is problematic because they can be classified on the basis of different criteria, on the basis of: - Traditional criteria (es: general or specialised dictionaries, contemporary or historical dictionaries) - Additional criteria for classifying online dictionaries, which are: User-involvement -> regards wether a dictionary is institutional (published by an institunal publisher) or collective (bottom up, collaborative -> created by non.professionals; es: wikipedia) Free vs Paid -> there are dictionaries where you pay per view, others where you have to subscribe to get access, in other cases if you buy the paper edition you get a bonus which enables you to access the online version, then there are ad-supported dictionaries (they can be free to users because they earne money from advertising), another category is the so-called freemium (a blend -> a word that comes from the union of two words, free and premium) where the basis content of the dictionary is free but publishers sell extra content, which may be richer lexicographic data (ex: synonyms and antonyms), non-lexicographic content (ex: exercises, language testing materials, writing skills zone…). Stand-alone vs dictionary sets vs dictionary aggregators -> a stand-alone dictionary is a single dictionary; dictionary sets are related dictionaries offered from a single page; dictionary aggregators paste the content of various dictionaries. General-purpose dictionaries with a rich treatmenr of contemporary dictionary (not related to a specific field and register) -> ex: America Heritage Dictionary (standalone), Collins English Free Dictionary (in a dictionary set). Institutional dictionaries, in particular learners’ dictionaries -> the Big 5 (British English): 1. Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (pioneer in this segment) 2. Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English 3. Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 4. Macmillan English Dictionary 5. COBUILD Although British publishers lead the market, there are American Learner’s Dictionary as well -> ex: Merriam-Webster’s Learner’s Dictionary; ex: Heinle’s Newbury House Dictionary of American English. The author of an article says that learners of American English should use British-published dictionaries of American English. Urban Dictionary -> the users can contribute to the definitions and examples of the dictionary, voting the “best” definitions; it is particularly valuable for slang, but it also contains definitions for everyday words. So the definitions are not scientific and academic, but they are supposed to be even funny, humourous, surprising.