Corpus driven identification of lexical bundle obsolescence in Late Modern English

Keyword(s):  
2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain Mackinnon

This article employs a new approach to studying internal colonialism in northern Scotland during the 18th and 19th centuries. A common approach to examining internal colonial situations within modern state territories is to compare characteristics of the internal colonial situation with attested attributes of external colonial relations. Although this article does not reject the comparative approach, it seeks to avoid criticisms that this approach can be misleading by demonstrating that promoters and managers of projects involving land use change, territorial dispossession and industrial development in the late modern Gàidhealtachd consistently conceived of their work as projects of colonization. It further argues that the new social, cultural and political structures these projects imposed on the area's indigenous population correspond to those found in other colonial situations, and that racist and racialist attitudes towards Gaels of the time are typical of those in colonial situations during the period. The article concludes that the late modern Gàidhealtachd has been a site of internal colonization where the relationship of domination between colonizer and colonized is complex, longstanding and occurring within the imperial state. In doing so it demonstrates that the history and present of the Gaels of Scotland belongs within the ambit of an emerging indigenous research paradigm.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ewa Nowak
Keyword(s):  

This volume contains articles written by eighteen representatives of the philosophical continental Europe, that bear witness to the fact that the concepts that made Professor Siemek famous worldwide – especially the epistemico-epistemological difference and late-modern socialization – are now more relevant than ever. Without referring to these concepts it is impossible to determine, where to find reason presently and what it should be concerned with.


Vamping the Stage is the first book-length historical and comparative examination of women, modernity, and popular music in Asia. This book documents the many ways that women performers have supported, challenged, and undermined representations of existing gendered norms in the entertainment industries of China, Japan, India, Indonesia, Iran, Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines. The case studies in this volume address colonial, post-colonial, as well as late modern conditions of culture as they relate to women’s musical practices and their changing social and cultural identities throughout Asia. Female entertainers were artistic pioneers of new music, new cinema, new forms of dance and theater, and new behavior and morals. Their voices, mediated through new technologies of film, radio, and the phonograph, changed the soundscape of global popular music and resonate today in all spheres of modern life. These female performers were not merely symbols of times that were rapidly changing. They were active agents in the creation of local performance cultures and the rise of a region-wide and globally oriented entertainment industry. Placing women’s voices in social and historical contexts, the authors critically analyze salient discourses, representations, meanings, and politics of “voice” in Asian popular music of the 20th century to the present day.


Author(s):  
Trude Fonneland

In the introduction, the outline of the chapters is presented, and the context for the study of contemporary shamanisms in Norway is drawn. The chapter provides an outline for why I have chosen to examine the field of shamanism in Norway through interviews, participant observation, and document analysis. I argue that the project, although obviously not exhaustive, nor even representative of the contemporary setting, represents a rare opportunity to study a late modern religious tradition in the process of evolution.


English Today ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Manfred Markus

Given today's general bias towards euphemisms (cf. Arif, 2015), the topic of this paper may seem embarrassing and ill-chosen. However, it makes sense to find out to what extent the spoken language of dialects in former centuries correlated with one of the dark sides of everyday reality. In Britain up to the second half of the 19th century, traditional dialect was the common linguistic medium of the large majority of people (the lower and middle classes), just before the norm of ‘King's English’ and, in linguistics, of système, started playing a dominant role. We may assume that the English dialects of the Late Modern English (LModE) period (1700–1900) were a correlative of people's everyday life.


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mo Li ◽  
Xiaotian Zhang ◽  
Barry Lee Reynolds

Abstract The use of formulaic language in written discourse is an important indicator of language competence. Nonetheless, the features of lexical bundles used by lower proficiency English as a Foreign Language learners have received little attention. The present study addressed this gap by employing a corpus-based method to investigate the quantity, function, and quality of four-word lexical bundles produced by low proficiency L2 English writers with 11 different L1 backgrounds in response to a timed English writing assessment. The investigation was specifically anchored on the data extracted from 1,330 essays using Wordsmith 7.0. Results of the investigation showed (1) an over dependence on writing topic related bundles; (2) an Indo-European L1 language background positively influencing lexical bundle production; (3) an overuse of stance expressions and discourse organizers at the expense of referential expression usage; (4) L1 Japanese, Korean, and Telugu writers producing more accurate lexical bundles and L1 German writers producing fewer accurate lexical bundles; and (5) the frequent use of lexical bundles not leading to highly accurate and appropriate use of lexical bundles. The implications of these results were discussed in connection with foreign language education.


2021 ◽  
pp. 007542422098206
Author(s):  
Claudia Claridge ◽  
Ewa Jonsson ◽  
Merja Kytö

Even though intensifiers have received a good deal of attention over the past few decades, downtoners, comprising diminishers and minimizers, have remained by and large a neglected category (but cf. Brinton, this issue). Among downtoners, the adverb little or a little stands out as the most frequent item. It is multifunctional and serves as a diminishing and minimizing intensifier and also in non-degree uses as a quantifier, frequentative, and durative. Therefore, the present paper is devoted to the structural and functional profile of ( a) little in Late Modern English speech-related data. The data source is the socio-pragmatically annotated Old Bailey Corpus (OBC, version 2.0), which allows, among other things, the investigation of the usage of the item among different speaker groups. Our research charts the semantic and formal uses of adverbial little. Downtoner uses outnumber non-degree uses in the data, and diminishing uses are more common than minimizing uses. The formal realization is predominantly a little, with very rare determinerless or modified instances, such as very little. Little modifies a wide range of “targets,” but most frequently adjectives and prepositional phrases, focusing on human states and circumstantial detail. With regard to variation and change, adverbial little declines in use over the 200 years and is used more commonly by speakers from the lower social ranks and by the lay, non-professional participants in the courtroom.


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