Focusing on school-age children's knowledge of morphology and word formation, this monograph presents a detailed analysis of vocabulary development among six- to ten-year-olds. Among the results discussed here is the significant distinction between recognizing words that were previously learned, and figuring them out by means of morphological analysis. The author's argument of the importance of morphological knowledge to children's lexical growth will intrigue child development specialists, linguists, and educators alike.

Vocabulary Development: A Morphological Analysis

The assumptions forming the basis of this study are that the language user has available a number of more-or-less preconstructed phrases and that the production of texts involves alternation between word-for-word combinations—which we refer to as adherence to the open choice principle (after Sinclair 1991)—and preconstructed multi-word combinations, which we refer to as making use of the idiom principle (again after Sinclair). The main aim of the study is to gain an Impression ofthe impact that this alternation has on the structure of texts. Therefore a mode of analysis has been worked out revealing how multi-word combinations combine with each other and with words combined according to the open choice principle. This is the main contribution of the study. Another important contribution is the revelation that there is a large amount of prefabricated language in bot h spoken and written texts (on average around half of the texts), which makes it impossible to consider idioms and other multi-word combinations as marginal phenomena.

The Idiom Principle and the Open Choice Principle

Lexicalization, a process of language change, has been conceptualized in a variety of ways. Broadly defined as the adoption of concepts into the lexicon, it has been viewed by syntacticians as the reverse process of grammaticalization, by morphologists as a routine process of word-formation, and by semanticists as the development of concrete meanings. In this up-to-date survey, Laurel Brinton and Elizabeth Traugott examine the various conceptualizations of lexicalization that have been presented in the literature. In light of contemporary work on grammaticalization, they then propose a new, unified model of lexicalization and grammaticalization. Their approach is illustrated with a variety of case studies from the history of English, including present participles, multi-word verbs, adverbs, and discourse markers, as well as some examples from other Indo-European languages. The first review of the various approaches to lexicalization, this book will be invaluable to students and scholars of historical linguistics and language change.

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Lexicalization and Language Change

In recent years there has been an increased focus on cancer patients' information needs. The majority of the studies have led to the conclusion that most patients want as much information as possible about their disease and treatment. These studies have been large survey studies, and most of the patients enrolled in them have been out-patients. Very little is known about the information needs of severely ill cancer patients being treated as in-patients—such as those with acute myeloid leukaemia (AML). As part of a larger study dealing with AML patients' illness narratives, this work describes the information needs from the patients' perspective and their information-seeking behaviour. In-depth ethnographic interviews were conducted with each of 21 patients on two occasions: at the time of diagnosis and again 2–5 months later. Most patients did not recall much information from the time of diagnosis, except the diagnosis itself and the feelings it had aroused in them. All patients had basic medical knowledge about their disease. However, many patients—especially the elderly—expressed no need to receive further medical details about their disease. Avoiding information, in particular about the prognosis, was explained as a strategy to maintain hope. Most patients attached more importance to information about problems affecting their everyday life and how other persons had coped with their illness. They did not seek medical information on their own, although especially younger patients expressed the feeling that they "ought" to do this. There was a discrepancy between their expressed attitudes regarding the need for medical information in general and their actual information-seeking behaviour. Being informed and seeking information are discussed as society's expectations of today's cancer patient.

The patient's perspective: a qualitative study of acute myeloid leukaemia patients' need for information and their information-seeking behaviour.

Idiomatic expressions are plentiful in everyday language, yet they remain mysterious, as it is not clear exactly how people learn and understand them. They are of special interest to linguists, psycholinguists, and lexicographers, mainly because of their syntactic and semantic idiosyncrasies as well as their unclear lexical status. Despite a great deal of research on the properties of idioms in the linguistics literature, there is not much agreement on which properties are characteristic of these expressions. Because of their peculiarities, idiomatic expressions have mostly been overlooked by researchers in computational linguistics. In this article, we look into the usefulness of some of the identified linguistic properties of idioms for their automatic recognition. Specifically, we develop statistical measures that each model a specific property of idiomatic expressions by looking at their actual usage patterns in text. We use these statistical measures in a type-based classification task where we automatically separate idiomatic expressions (expressions with a possible idiomatic interpretation) from similar-on-the-surface literal phrases (for which no idiomatic interpretation is possible). In addition, we use some of the measures in a token identification task where we distinguish idiomatic and literal usages of potentially idiomatic expressions in context.

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Unsupervised type and token identification of idiomatic expressions

Oxford dictionary of current idiomatic englisg , Oxford dictionary of current idiomatic englisg , کتابخانه الکترونیک و دیجیتال - آذرسا

Oxford dictionary of current idiomatic English

Oxford dictionary of english idioms , Oxford dictionary of english idioms , کتابخانه مرکزی دانشگاه علوم پزشکی تهران

Oxford dictionary of English idioms

Oxford dictionary of phrasal verbs , Oxford dictionary of phrasal verbs , مرکز فناوری اطلاعات و اطلاع رسانی کشاورزی

Ronald Mackin

Papers

Oxford dictionary of current idiomatic English

Oxford dictionary of English idioms

Oxford Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs

Varieties of Spoken English

More varieties of spoken English