Open-Access-Bücher zur Sprachwissenschaft

Communicating Linguistics: Language, Community and Public Engagement

Hazel Price & Dan McIn­tyre (Hrsg.)
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003096078

Increas­ing­ly, aca­d­e­mics are called upon to demon­strate the val­ue of lin­guis­tics and explain their research to the wider pub­lic. In sup­port of this agen­da, Com­mu­ni­cat­ing Lin­guis­tics: Lan­guage, Com­mu­ni­ty and Pub­lic Engage­ment pro­vides an overview of the wide range of pub­lic engage­ment activ­i­ties cur­rent­ly being under­tak­en in lin­guis­tics, as well as prac­ti­cal­ly focused advice aimed at help­ing lin­guists to do pub­lic engage­ment well. From pod­casts to pop­u­lar writ­ing, from com­pe­ti­tions to con­sul­tan­cy, from lan­guage cre­ation to com­mu­ni­ty projects, there are many ways in which lin­guists can share their research with the pub­lic. Bring­ing togeth­er insights from lead­ing lin­guists work­ing in acad­e­mia as well as non-uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sions, this unique col­lec­tion:

• Pro­vides a forum for the dis­cus­sion of chal­lenges and oppor­tu­ni­ties of pub­lic engage­ment in lin­guis­tics in order to shape best prac­tice
• Doc­u­ments best prac­tice through a sum­ma­ry of some of the many excel­lent pub­lic engage­ment projects cur­rent­ly tak­ing place inter­na­tion­al­ly
• Cel­e­brates the long tra­di­tion of pub­lic engage­ment in lin­guis­tics, a dis­ci­pline which is often mis­un­der­stood despite its direct and fun­da­men­tal impor­tance to every­day life

Break­ing down long-stand­ing divi­sions between uni­ver­si­ties and the wider com­mu­ni­ty, this book will be of sig­nif­i­cant val­ue to aca­d­e­mics in lin­guis­tics but also teach­ers, pol­i­cy mak­ers and any­one inter­est­ed in bet­ter under­stand­ing the nature and use of lan­guage in soci­ety.

Language assessment in multilingual settings: Innovative practices across formal and informal environments

Rosi­ta L. Rivera & Eva Rodríguez-González (Hrsg.)
https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/333
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6535786

This vol­ume explores and address­es ques­tions relat­ed to equi­table access for assess­ment. It seeks to ini­ti­ate a con­ver­sa­tion among schol­ars about inclu­sive prac­tices in lan­guage assess­ments. Whether the stu­dent is a sec­ond lan­guage learn­er, a her­itage lan­guage learn­er, a mul­ti­lin­gual lan­guage speak­er, a com­mu­ni­ty mem­ber, the authors in the present vol­ume pro­vide exam­ples of assess­ment that do not fol­low a sin­gle uni­ver­sal or stan­dard­ized design but an applic­a­ble one based on the needs and con­text of a giv­en com­mu­ni­ty. The con­trib­u­tors in this vol­ume are schol­ars from dif­fer­ent dis­ci­plines and con­texts in High­er Edu­ca­tion. They have cre­at­ed and pro­posed mul­ti­ple low­er-stakes assign­ments and accom­mo­dat­ed learn­ing by being flex­i­ble and open with­out assum­ing that learn­ers know how to do spe­cif­ic tasks. Each chap­ter pro­vides dif­fer­ent exam­ples on Jus­tice, Equi­ty, Diver­si­ty, and Inclu­sion (JEDI) assess­ment prac­tices based on obser­va­tion, exam­i­na­tion, and inte­gra­tive notions of diverse lan­guage sce­nar­ios. It may be of inter­est to researchers and prac­ti­tion­ers in the fields of cur­ricu­lum and instruc­tion, lan­guage learn­ing, and applied lin­guis­tics as well as those in the field of lan­guage teach­ing in gen­er­al. Thus this vol­ume broad­ens the scope of research in the area of mul­ti­lin­gual assess­ment.

Speaking of causality: On the role of prosody in communicating subjective and objective causality in discourse

Na Hu
https://doi.org/10.48273/LOT0637

Human mind dis­tin­guish­es between dif­fer­ent types of causal rela­tions, such as those that can be direct­ly observed from the phys­i­cal world (e.g., “My daugh­ter had a fight with her best friend, so she cried”), and those that are con­struct­ed by peo­ple in the men­tal world (e.g., “My daugh­ter cried, so maybe she had a fight with her best friend”). Pre­vi­ous research has shown that coher­ence mark­ers, such as spe­cial­ized causal con­nec­tives (e.g., want ‘because’ and omdat ‘because’ in Dutch), can help peo­ple deter­mine the type of causal­i­ty the speak­er intends to express (sub­jec­tive vs. objec­tive). This dis­ser­ta­tion focus­es on the role of prosody—changes in pitch, loud­ness, or timing—in com­mu­ni­cat­ing dif­fer­ent types of causal­i­ty.

This dis­ser­ta­tion explores this issue in two steps. First, using a dia­logue task, this dis­ser­ta­tion exam­ines the use of prosody in express­ing the two dif­fer­ent types of causal­i­ty. The results show that there is a trade-off between the use of prosody and the use of spe­cial­ized causal con­nec­tives in express­ing sub­jec­tive and objec­tive causal rela­tions. Based on this find­ing, this dis­ser­ta­tion pro­ceeds to exam­ine the effect of prosod­ic infor­ma­tion on the con­struc­tion of causal­i­ty. The results obtained from a dis­course com­ple­tion task show that the prosody fea­tures of the con­nec­tive so affect lis­ten­ers’ expec­ta­tion of the causal­i­ty in the upcom­ing con­text.

This dis­ser­ta­tion pro­vides new insights into how dif­fer­ent types of causal­i­ty are com­mu­ni­cat­ed in speech com­mu­ni­ca­tion by show­ing that not only the lex­i­cal infor­ma­tion but also the prosod­ic infor­ma­tion plays a role.