scholarly journals Words in Sheep’s Clothing

2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 51-62
Author(s):  
Dušan Gabrovšek

The paper focuses on various types of dictionary words, i.e. infrequent and rather uncommon words often listed in comprehensive monolingual English dictionaries but virtually nonexistent in actual usage. These are typically learned derivatives of Greek or Latin origin that are given as unlabeled synonyms of everyday vocabulary items. Their inclusion seems to stem from the application of two different bits of lexicographic philosophy: great respect for matters classical and the principle of comprehensiveness. Seen from this perspective, descriptive corpus-based lexicography is still too weak. While in large native-speaker-oriented dictionaries of English such entries do not seem to cause any harm, they can be positively dangerous in EFL/ESL environments, because using them can easily lead to strange or downright incomprehensible lexical items. Learners are advised to be careful and check the status of such “dubious” items also in English monolingual learners’ dictionaries, in which dictionary words are virtually nonexistent.

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-105
Author(s):  
Arkadiusz Rojczyk ◽  
Andrzej Porzuczek

This paper addresses the issue of speech rhythm as a cue to non-native pronunciation. In natural recordings, it is impossible to disentangle rhythm from segmental, subphonemic or suprasegmental features that may influence nativeness ratings. However, two methods of speech manipulation, that is, backwards content-masked speech and vocoded speech, allow the identification of native and non-native speech in which segmental properties are masked and become inaccessible to the listeners. In the current study, we use these two methods to compare the perception of content-masked native English speech and Polish-accented speech. Both native English and Polish-accented recordings were manipulated using backwards masked speech and 4-band white-noise vocoded speech. Fourteen listeners classified the stimuli as produced by native or Polish speakers of English. Polish and English differ in their temporal organization, so, if rhythm is a significant contributor to the status of non-native accentedness, we expected an above-chance rate of recognition of native and non-native English speech. Moreover, backwards content-masked speech was predicted to yield better results than vocoded speech, because it retains some of the indexical properties of speakers. The resultsshow that listeners are unable to detect non-native accent in Polish learners of English from backwards and vocoded speech samples.


Author(s):  
Hanne Kristine Angelshaug

The title “interpreter” is not a professional title in Norway; Norwegian legislation only applies to “sworn interpreters” authorized by the Directorate of Integration and Diversity (IMDi). The interpreter authorization scheme is one of the steps that have been taken to guarantee the quality of the interpreters and their services. Another step has been the creation of the National Register of Interpreters, which provides the public with access to qualified interpreters. However, the register is not flawless and may exclude well-qualified interpreters. The register has five qualification categories with different sets of requirements; the only problem is that the interpreter’s access to the different courses that enables the interpreter to enter the register is limited. This problem could be remedied easily by means of the official exams for the grant of the title ”sworn interpreter”, but regretfully the exams, as well as the necessary courses to advance from category to category in the register, are not available in all language combinations or on a frequent basis. The distinction between an “interpreter” and a “sworn interpreter” may not be the quality, as much as the professional title and having access to education. In this context, the importance of licensing or professionalization linked to the phenomenon of trust becomes evident. The foreign and native speaker have to communicate through an interpreter, they need to trust the interpreter in order to get their message through, but why anyone should do that without a guarantee that the interpreter is qualified is another question. Mainly non-professional interpreters perform interpretation in the public sector and several studies show that the interpreters lack linguistic and professional skills to do their job satisfactory. This problem should not be ignored, but rather properly addressed by establishing a professional graduate degree to ensure the quality of the interpreter and consolidate the status of the interpreter as a professional in the public sector in Norway. However, this is only one side of the problem, it is also necessary to promote and ensure the use of qualified labour in the public sector.


2018 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jamal Malik

Globalization has been made responsible for a variety of (re)invented traditions with a trend toward a new religious foundation in and of societies. With Islamic proselytism having gone global, it may resemble religious resistance to the status quo, when pious Muslims instigate homogenizing daʿwa activities and attempt to endow them with moral obligations and normative superstructure. The proliferation of standards and fledgling processes of ideological framing are traceable in what is called fiqh al-daʿwa, which includes general theorizing and ostensibly legal reasoning on daʿwa. In reality, it is more of a missionary ideology given weight by being clothed in Islamic legal terminology. This paper investigates the fiqh of daʿwa in its global setting, with an emphasis on its radical Islamist articulations. It does so by examining fiqh al-daʿwa’s legally, or rather ideologically and morally, charged treatises. In this way, the article reconstructs the genealogy of this rather new genre, as well as its social composition, its ideational grounding, and its normative potential. The condensed forms and derivatives of fiqh of daʿwa will be documented by means of certain rules, methods, and strategies of Islamist ideologues and organizations, particularly the post-Huḍaybī Muslim Brotherhood.1



Author(s):  
A. J. Minchener

Fluidized bed combustion (FBC) in various forms has been used to burn all types of coal, coal waste and a wide variety of other fuels, either singly or cofired with coal. FBC boilers are currently available commercially in the capacity range from 1 MWth to over 250 MWe and continue to be adopted for a variety of commercial, industrial and power generation applications. There are two main derivatives of FBC, namely bubbling fluidized bed combustion (BFBC) and circulating fluidized bed combustion (CFBC). There are also several hybrid systems and pressurized versions of both BFBC and CFBC. The status of these different systems, with some now fully commercial and some still under development, is described, with projections made for future development requirements and market opportunities.


2016 ◽  
Vol 94 (8) ◽  
pp. 748-750 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Dwivedi

Pressure derivatives of bulk modulus of materials at infinite pressure or extreme compression have been studied using some basic principles of calculus. Expressions for higher order pressure derivatives at infinite pressure are obtained that are found to have the status of identities. A generalized formula is derived for the nth-order pressure derivative of bulk modulus in terms of the third-order Grüneisen parameter at infinite pressure.


Author(s):  
Tri Murni ◽  
Robert Sibarani ◽  
Eddy Setia ◽  
Gustianigsih Gustianingsihh

The purpose of this study is to present syntactic descriptions of how movement transformational rules apply in Gayo syntax and to examine the status of movement transformational rules in Gayo language (henceforth GL) in the theoretical framework of Transformational Linguistics (TL) proposed by Chomsky (1965, 1981) and Suhadi (2018). In this theory there are three kinds of syntactic rules: Movement Rule, Deletion Rule and Substitution Rule. The discussion focuses on Movement Transformational Rules in GL. Transformation is the inter-related process between the deep structure and the surface structure of a sentence by the application of one or more transformational rules. The method used in this study was descriptive qualitative approach as noted by Martin (2004). Descriptive research is to portray accurately the characteristics of a particular situation or group or individual with or without special initial hypotheses about the nature of these characteristics. Thus, descriptive research design was applied to give a detail description of a certain case accurately. The data were analyzed from two angles: the application and the status of movement rules in GL, which can be compulsory, optional, and restricted. The data of this research derived from some sentences in the folklore story written in GL and the invention of the writer herself as the native speaker of the language. The finding shows that all the twelve kinds of movement transformational rules proposed by Suhadi (2018) are relevant to apply in GL. After the application of movement rules, the main finding is on the status of movement transformational rules in GL in which it is found that four movement rules are compulsory, eight are optional and there is no restricted rule in the language.


2021 ◽  
pp. 20-31
Author(s):  
Isabella Tinkel ◽  
Marie Deissl-O’Meara

English has become a global lingua franca unlike any language before. This has led to the increased pragmatic use of English by an increasing number of non-native speakers and, consequently, English as a lingua franca (ELF) has emerged. It has become a contact language between speakers of different mother tongues which has led to the blurring of strict regulatory frameworks formerly established by native English varieties. ELF speakers use English in creative ways and influenced by their native languages and cultures and the imitation of the native speaker has been pushed to the background in favor of successful communication. In order to facilitate the examination of this new type of English, several ELF corpora have been established, two of which are used for this study. The Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) and the Asian Corpus of English (ACE) are both collections of spoken interactions between ELF speakers that have the same size and rely on the same coding system and search parameters, which make them readily comparable. While these corpora have already aided in the discovery of several common features of ELF in general, this study focuses on the lexico-grammatical feature of the pluralization of mass nouns by either adding the ‘s’ or some type of quantifier in European and Asian ELF. Results show that Asian ELF speakers are less likely to pluralize mass nouns than European ELF speakers. Yet, pluralization can be found in both types of ELF and this, along with other specific, non-standard features, raises questions for English language teaching and the status of native English.


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucie Pultrová

Abstract The term “suppletion”, introduced by Osthoff (1899. Vom Suppletivwesen der indogermanischen Sprachen. Heidelberg: Universitätsbuchdruckerei Hörning), was traditionally used to refer to an inflectional paradigm containing forms based on two or more etymologically different stems. In the last decades, however, it has been argued that etymology does not contribute to our understanding of the phenomenon, and it should be strictly defined on synchronic terms: simply as the peak point on the formal irregularity scale, regardless of the actual origin of the irregularity. Under this approach, all forms reported by speakers as two potentially different lexical items are considered to be suppletive. To be able to determine what users of a living language consider to be a case of suppletion, it is possible to analyze data collected from speakers. The situation is considerably more difficult for dead languages, which however have played an important role in the debate and provided many of the canonical examples. As a closest equivalent to eliciting the required information from a native speaker, the informed but from the present-day perspective naïve expressions of linguistic introspection in the works of Late Latin Grammarians, namely their use of specific terms (defectivum, anomalum, inaequale) to refer to different degrees and lexical examples of irregularity, are highly valuable, as it also may reflect the difficulties confronted by non-native learners.


2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 326-361 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jun Gao ◽  
Haitao Liu

Abstract Learners’ thesauri do not simply offer an inventory of semantically related lexical items but explicate their nuances and furnish users with rich syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic information. Adopting the theoretical framework of valency, this study examines the distinctive features of two English learners’ thesauri, the Oxford Learner’s Thesaurus: A Dictionary of Synonyms (OLT) and the Longman Language Activator (LLA). Furthermore, the study, supported by learner corpus evidence, empirically assesses the usefulness of OLT and LLA in Chinese learners’ writing. The results demonstrate that learners’ thesauri can generally meet the practical needs of users in writing through providing a range of synonyms and syntactic patterns, including abundant information on semantic collocations, and offering rich pragmatic information regarding registers and emotive variables. The results also show some defects in OLT and LLA, such as their failure to present specific syntactic patterns, including those frequently used in Chinese learners’ compositions. It is then suggested that the compilation of learners’ thesauri draw upon the ways in which lexical information is presented in the English Valency Dictionary, and that learner corpora and native speaker corpora be combined to improve their usefulness.


2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabet Arocena Egaña ◽  
Jasone Cenoz ◽  
Durk Gorter

In this article we analyze teachers’ beliefs about learning different languages in multilingual education, which include forms of immersion in the minority and the majority languages. In this study interviews were held with 51 primary school teachers from the Basque Country (Spain), and Friesland (The Netherlands). In both regions three languages are taught: majority, minority and English. Based on the teachers’ views we obtain interesting insights into the native speaker ideal, pupils as multilingual speakers, and the proficiency levels for each language. The teachers also expressed their ideas on teaching through the minority language and through English, as well as their beliefs on cross-linguistic use of languages and how that is related to the multilingual repertoire. The social context is believed to have an important influence through the parents, the media, and the status of the languages in society. The article concludes that beliefs are still largely monolingual and seem to only gradually change to more multilingual views.


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