Most frameworks of linguistic analysis tend to highlight phenomena of language use and/or language knowledge such as sentence and word structure, while backgrounding or ignoring other phenomena that are interpreted as being of more marginal interest for the linguist. The main goal of this paper is to argue that some phenomena that have previously been treated as being more peripheral play an important role in the organization of linguistic discourse, and that the latter operates in at least two different domains, namely that of sentence grammar and of thetical grammar. Each of the two domains has its own internal structure, and the two tend to be separated from one another syntactically, prosodically, and semantically. Building on recent research, the paper aims at defining the main characteristics of thetical grammar.
While the study of language has been approached from a wide range of perspectives and theoretical assumptions, it is widely assumed that language structure can be reduced essentially to a fairly monolithic system of mental and linguistic activity. Some recent lines of psychological, linguistic, and neurolinguistic research suggest, however, that human cognitive behavior in general and linguistic discourse in particular exhibit a dualistic organization. In accordance with this research tradition, the present paper argues that there is a basic distinction between two domains of linguistic discourse and that this distinction shows a number of correlations with neural processing, more specifically with hemispheric lateralization of the human brain.
This paper investigates the communicative use ofit-extraposition (e.g.It is surprising that John went to London) in texts, based on a corpus analysis of 1,701 instances in the British component of theInternational Corpus of English. Contrary to the wayit-extraposition is often treated in the literature, it does not represent a uniform functional category whose communicative purpose arises mainly from its status as the stylistically unmarked counterpart of non-extraposition. An analysis of the information status of the extraposed subject shows that it is possible to distinguish two basic types (Given Complement Extraposition and New Complement Extraposition) which differ fundamentally in their communicative potential and distribution in different (spoken and written) text types. For each of the two informational types a number of specific uses in texts are identified taking into account thematic structure (topic-comment) and the semantic nature of the matrix predicate.
With computer corpora firmly established as research tools in linguistics, their application for language teaching purposes is also increasingly advocated to the extent that corpus-based language teaching has even been praised as the new revolution in language teaching (cf. Sinclair, 2004b). This article takes a more critical view and examines some of the potential as well as the limitations of computer corpora in the language classroom, providing practical examples from the British Component of the International Corpus of English. It is argued that only a balanced view, which takes into account both the strengths and weaknesses of computer corpora for language teaching, can ensure their successful integration into the language classroom. The discussion first focuses on the limitations of corpus data, which are identified as ‘externalized’, as opposed to ‘internalized’ language, lacking contextual, as opposed to co-textual, information. On the other hand, computer corpora provide access to information not easily available from other sources, viz. information on frequency of occurrence in various text types, and co-occurrence patterns, e.g. collocation, colligation, semantic prosody). This information, however, also has to be seen in the light of the more general questions of how representative corpus results are and to what extent they are generalisable. The article concludes with a discussion of pedagogical implications of the use of computer corpora, especially with regard to their application as tools for exploratory/discovery learning and as means for promoting learner autonomy.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.