https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0261444800003402

Contributions to English syntax and philology

Special-Purpose Language Learning: A Perspective

Educated spoken Arabic (ESA), like any of the world's innumerable other koineized forms of speech, greatly depends for its maintenance and dissemination on the binding power of writing, on its quasi-permanence and transferability in space and time. It is understandable, too, that koines – and the koineizing tradition is an ancient one in the eastern Mediterranean – should regularly call upon earlier, whence written ancestral forms and, as far as the Arab and Islamic worlds are concerned, the fundamental importance of the immutable Koran cannot be over-estimated. Although a koine needs a spoken base, Classical Arabic, itself probably never the dialect of any single group or region (cf. Ferguson, 1959), substantially contributed through its more or less fixed written norms to an older koine and nowadays, via the so-called Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) of contemporary literature, journalism and ‘spoken prose’, to a more recently emergent pan-Arabic or, conceivably, pan-Arabics. In a not dissimilar way, in the Romance-speaking area, Latin existed for centuries as the language, for example, of clerics, side by side with developing regional koines and subsequent new literary languages which borrowed greatly from it, just as the Classical Latin koine was itself modelled by writers, like Cicero, whose cultural values were determined and carried by Greek. A crucial difference, however, between Latin vis-a-vis the Romance languages and Classical Arabic or the substantially similar MSA vis-a-vis ESA is that the latter qua spoken language may not be any more freely written than the regional vernaculars of Arabic. It is not, for instance, orthographic or orthoepic difficulties that inhibit the ‘transcribing“ of spoken Arabic of whatever kind but rather the almost mystical regard in which Arabs hold their written language to the detriment of spoken counterparts.

Educated spoken Arabic in Egypt and the Levant, with special reference to participle and tense

The aim of this paper is first to present some theoretical guidelines on the design and compilation of a specialized corpus in compliance with Corpus Linguistics standards; second, to provide a comprehensive description of the stages followed in the creation of the Telecommunication Engineering Corpus and its characteristics; and finally, to report the immediate results obtained from the basic analysis of the corpus: statistical information and frequency list. This paper is particularly addressed to those ESP practitioners who have to deal with the compilation of a specialized corpus for the first time, without a working knowledge of the specific subject domain they are involved in 1 .

background

Getting on with corpus compilation: from theory to practice.

The first academic periodical was the Journal des Scavans, which first appeared in January 1665. It was followed two months later by the Philosophical Transactions. The Journal des Scavans was sponsored by the state and was made up mainly of book reviews and covered all the known disciplines of the time. The Philosophical Transactions was a private venture based on Oldenburg’s correspondence and was restricted to science and technology. Scientific writers were motivated by personal reputation, the desire to improve the human condition, and, sometimes, priority. The “publish or perish” syndrome is a recent development. Among the factors that have influenced it are the increasing professionalization of science, the development of the peer-review system, and, towards the end of the twentieth century, a desire for rapid publication. The fact that English has (recently) become the lingua franca of scientific publishing creates additional difficulties for non-Anglophone scientists, which their Anglophone colleagues do not have to face. Scientific language, similar to all languages, evolves constantly. One area that seems to be changing at the moment is that of passive use, which is the subject of ongoing research. Cultural differences may also have a role to play. For example, French scientists may have to overcome a basically Cartesian education.

methods

https://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/6/1/10/pdf

Thoughts on Publishing the Research Article over the Centuries

/pdf/perspectives-in-medical-english-m1gisbnxjj.pdf

Contributions to English syntax and philology

Citations

Special-Purpose Language Learning: A Perspective

Educated spoken Arabic in Egypt and the Levant, with special reference to participle and tense

Getting on with corpus compilation: from theory to practice.

Thoughts on Publishing the Research Article over the Centuries

Perspectives in medical English

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