The Linguistic Individual

Author : Barbara Johnstone
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0195101855
Total Pages : 230 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Linguistic Individual written by Barbara Johnstone and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1996 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Linguists usually discuss language or dialects in terms of groups of speakers. Believing that patterns can be seen more clearly in the group than the individual, researchers often present group scores with no indication of the variation within the group. Even though linguists acknowledge that no two individuals speak alike, few study individual variation and voice. Barbara Johnstone makes a case for the individual's importance and idiosyncrasies in language and linguistics. Using theoretical arguments and discourse analysis, along with linguistic examples from a variety of speakers and settings, Johnstone illustrates how speakers draw on linguistic models associated with class, ethnicity, gender, and region, among others, to construct an individual voice. In doing so Johnstone shows that certain important questions in sociolinguistics and pragmatics can only be answered with reference to individual speakers. Johnstone's study is important both for the understanding of speech as expressive of self, and for the study of variation and mechanisms of linguistic choice and change.

Author : Barbara Johnstone
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0195356330
Total Pages : 230 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Linguistic Individual written by Barbara Johnstone and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1996-06-27 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Linguists usually discuss language or dialects in terms of groups of speakers. Believing that patterns can be seen more clearly in the group than the individual, researchers often present group scores with no indication of the variation within the group. Even though linguists acknowledge that no two individuals speak alike, few study individual variation and voice. Barbara Johnstone makes a case for the individual's importance and idiosyncrasies in language and linguistics. Using theoretical arguments and discourse analysis, along with linguistic examples from a variety of speakers and settings, Johnstone illustrates how speakers draw on linguistic models associated with class, ethnicity, gender, and region, among others, to construct an individual voice. In doing so Johnstone shows that certain important questions in sociolinguistics and pragmatics can only be answered with reference to individual speakers. Johnstone's study is important both for the understanding of speech as expressive of self, and for the study of variation and mechanisms of linguistic choice and change.

Author : Phil Benson
Publisher : Equinox Publishing (UK)
ISBN 13 : 9781908049391
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.91/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Applied Linguistic Individual written by Phil Benson and published by Equinox Publishing (UK). This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A focus on learner individuality in Applied Linguistics has been considered a mark of theoretical weakness from several perspectives. One branch of second language acquisition research has systematically discounted individual characteristics in favour of a search for universal acquisition processes. Another has adopted 'individual differences' as its object of inquiry, but emphasises psychological and sociological group characteristics over those of individuals. At the other end of the spectrum, critical researchers have viewed these approaches as 'individualistic' and have emphasised instead the deeply social character of second language acquisition. More recently, however, the qualitative approaches favoured by socially-oriented researchers have begun to bring issues of individuality to the fore. Autonomy, agency and identity have emerged as important constructs through which researchers are seeking to understand relationships between individuals and the social contexts in which they learn and use languages, and case studies of individuals have become a preferred approach to Applied Linguistics research. These developments raise important questions about the relationship between the social and individual, which has now become a key philosophical and methodological issue in research. This volume addresses this issue through contributions from researchers who carry out their work in a variety of settings in Asia, Australasia, Europe, and North and South America. The authors explore how individuality is conceptualised in socially-oriented approaches to Applied Linguistics research, including Sociocultural Theory, Situated Learning, Imagined Communities, Complexity Theory, and Autonomy Theory. Is there a tension between the social and the individual in these approaches, and if so, how is it manifested and resolved in empirical research?

Author : Charles J Fillmore
Publisher : Academic Press
ISBN 13 : 1483263207
Total Pages : 363 pages
Book Rating : 4.05/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Individual Differences in Language Ability and Language Behavior written by Charles J Fillmore and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2014-05-10 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Individual Differences in Language Ability and Language Behavior is a collection of papers that discusses differences at the center of the study of language, specifically, on the various dimensions of linguistic ability and behavior along which individuals can differ from each other. Papers also review the development of techniques that measure these dimensions in relation to biological, psychological, and cultural parameters. Some papers review individual differences in language study in terms of different perspectives: that of a psychometrician's, of an individualistic's vantage point, and of a psycholinguistic's. Other papers discuss how each individual accesses, uses, and judges his language through fluency, biases, spatial principles, or a linguistic-phonetic mode. Several papers examine individual differences in language acquisition, such as "profile analysis," strategies in acquisition of sounds, second language learning, and duplication of adult language system. A group of papers addresses the biological aspects of language variation. These biological aspects include selective disorders of syntax (agrammatism), selective disorders of lexical retrieval (anomia), and cerebral lateralization effects in language processing. Certain papers explain individual differences in languages using sociolinguistic analysis. The collection is well suited for linguists, ethnologists, psychologists, and researchers whose works involve linguistics, learning, communications, and syntax.

Author : Almerindo E. Ojeda
Publisher : Center for the Study of Language (CSLI)
ISBN 13 : 9780937073858
Total Pages : 228 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Linguistic Individuals written by Almerindo E. Ojeda and published by Center for the Study of Language (CSLI). This book was released on 1993 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The goal of semantics is the insightful identification of the set of meanings that human language can express - the construction of what has been called the metaphysics of natural language. A formal attempt to construct such a metaphysics has generally involved identifying a set of individuals referred to as the universe of discourse. Until recently, however, semanticists have had little to say about the structure of this set. Ojeda argues that the structure of the set of linguistic individuals is a mereology, that is, the domain of discourse is made up of kinds and the instantiations of kinds. His argument forms the four main sections of this work. The first examines the semantics of countability (countable stems, number inflection, adjectives of measure, and determiners); the second explores the semantics of uncountability (the individuation of reference, the reversibility of countability, cumulative and distributive reference, and non-Boolean mass predicates); the third takes up the semantics of nominality (the mereological homogeneity of nouns and the constraints on nouns in classifier languages); and the last investigates the semantics of the conceptional neuter, a pronominal category discussed by Otto Jesperson. Ojeda's investigations contribute to the characterization of linguistic individuals and provide for a new basis for the semantics of individuation.

Author : Alexander Werth
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110743124
Total Pages : 350 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Intra-individual Variation in Language written by Alexander Werth and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers several empirical, methodological, and theoretical approaches to the study of observable variation within individuals on various linguistic levels. With a focus on German varieties, the chapters provide answers on the following questions (inter alia): Which linguistic and extra-linguistic factors explain intra-individual variation? Is there observable intra-individual variation that cannot be explained by linguistic and extra-linguistic factors? Can group-level results be generalised to individual language usage and vice versa? Is intra-individual variation indicative of actual patterns of language change? How can intra-individual variation be examined in historical data? Consequently, the various theoretical, methodological and empirical approaches in this volume offer a better understanding of the meaning of intra-individual variation for patterns of language development, language variation and change. The inter- and transdisciplinary nature of the volume is an exciting new frontier, and the results of the studies in this book provide a wealth of new findings as well as challenges to some of the existing findings and assumptions regarding the nature of intra-individual variation.

Author : Charles Taylor
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674970276
Total Pages : 364 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Language Animal written by Charles Taylor and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-14 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Sources of the Self to A Secular Age, Charles Taylor has shown how we create ways of being, as individuals and as a society. Here, he demonstrates that language is at the center of this generative process. Language does not merely describe; it constitutes meaning, and the shared practice of speech shapes human experience.

Author : Francesca Di Garbo
Publisher : Language Science Press
ISBN 13 : 3961101787
Total Pages : 350 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Grammatical gender and linguistic complexity I written by Francesca Di Garbo and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The many facets of grammatical gender remain one of the most fruitful areas of linguistic research, and pose fascinating questions about the origins and development of complexity in language. The present work is a two-volume collection of 13 chapters on the topic of grammatical gender seen through the prism of linguistic complexity. The contributions discuss what counts as complex and/or simple in grammatical gender systems, whether the distribution of gender systems across the world’s languages relates to the language ecology and social history of speech communities. Contributors demonstrate how the complexity of gender systems can be studied synchronically, both in individual languages and over large cross-linguistic samples, and diachronically, by exploring how gender systems change over time. In addition to three chapters on the theoretical foundations of gender complexity, volume one contains six chapters on grammatical gender and complexity in individual languages and language families of Africa, New Guinea, and South Asia. This volume is complemented by volume two, which consists of three chapters providing diachronic and typological case studies, followed by a final chapter discussing old and new theoretical and empirical challenges in the study of the dynamics of gender complexity.

Author : Otto Jespersen
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Mankind, Nation and Individual from a Linguistic Point of View written by Otto Jespersen and published by . This book was released on 1925 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Lauren Hall-Lew
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108633609
Total Pages : 405 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Social Meaning and Linguistic Variation written by Lauren Hall-Lew and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-12 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 'third wave' of variation study, spearheaded by the sociolinguist Penelope Eckert, places its focus on social meaning, or the inferences that can be drawn about speakers based on how they talk. While social meaning has always been a concern of modern sociolinguistics, its aims and assumptions have not been explicitly spelled out until now. This pioneering book provides a comprehensive overview of the central tenets of variation study, examining several components of dialects, and considering language use in a wide variety of cultural and linguistic contexts. Each chapter, written by a leader in the field, posits a unique theoretical claim about social meaning and presents new empirical data to shed light on the topic at hand. The volume makes a case for why attending to social meaning is vital to the study of variation while also providing a foundation from which variationists can productively engage with social meaning.