Checked baggage: spatial negotiations in contemporary air travel

This paper examines the act of undertaking international air travel and analyses how it forces individuals to consider a range of ideas as a result of dislocation and attempts to re-align themselves within spatial, material and biological structures. In order to balance the shifts between spatial and material experiences, travellers employ imaginative and perceptive procedures, gaining knowledge through experience. At the intersection of participatory and spatial boundaries through the lens of multi-disciplinary literature, this paper explores how practices of individuals within international air travel provides alternative modes of thinking and navigating through personal, cultural and globalised public spaces.

Meteorology for all; facts about the atmosphere, air travel, weather forecasting, clouds, winds, storms [and] how to read the weather map,

Mode of access: Internet.

A depth study of the meaning of air travel in the jet age.

Mode of access: Internet.

Adequacy of flight schedules at Newark airport. Survey of air travel plan cardholders who work in northern New Jersey,

Mode of access: Internet.

Multidimensional analysis of perceived risk in commercial air travel

This study attempts to assess the role of perceived risk in air passenger behaviour. A survey of 889 respondents is used to investigate a multidimensional concept of perceived risk and to analyse the differences between socio-demographic characteristics regarding passengers' risk assessment. The results indicate that financial risk and temporal risk are the most important in the context of commercial air travel. All perceived risk dimensions differ according gender, age, cultural background, income, previous experience, and reason for travelling. (C) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

A statistical analysis of the structure of language found in the essay writing of a sample of technical college students and public school boys

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Obesity and Air Travel: Weighing Up the Issues

It may soon be the norm for many airline passengers arriving at the check-in desk of any international airline with both stow- away and carry-on luggage to be asked to step onto the weighing scale as the airlines attempt to compete and remain operationally viable in what has become for most a cut-throat and highly litigious operating environment. The author's commentary seeks to highlight a number of the issues surrounding the current impasse. It is also intended to catalyze a more healthy and informed debate aimed at finding an acceptable resolution to this crisis prior to one being imposed which fails to satisfy the needs of either camp.

Time series analysis of air transportation service quality and travel demand in Japan

The evolution of domestic air travel service in Japan is a product of many factors including airline responses to the changing aviation market, government interventions in terms of regulatory/deregulatory policies, infrastructure investments, and changes in market structure. This paper presents an empirical investigation of the changing quality of passenger airline service and its implications in the domestic aviation market in Japan using qualitative review and a time series analysis of the domestic airline markets from 1986 to 2003. The results show that to meet the ultimate aim of deregulation to increase air passengers’ welfare gain, there is a need to instill measures to correct service imbalance and to create innovative airport demand-capacity management measures.

Is phraseology the third articulation of language? Fresh insights into a theoretical conundrum

Is phraseology the third articulation of language? Fresh insights into a theoretical conundrum Jean-Pierre Colson University of Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium) Although the notion of phraseology is now used across a wide range of linguistic disciplines, its definition and the classification of phraseological units remain a subject of intense debate. It is generally agreed that phraseology implies polylexicality, but this term is problematic as well, because it brings us back to one of the most controversial topics in modern linguistics: the definition of a word. On the other hand, another widely accepted principle of language is the double articulation or duality of patterning (Martinet 1960): the first articulation consists of morphemes and the second of phonemes. The very definition of morphemes, however, also poses several problems, and the situation becomes even more confused if we wish to take phraseology into account. In this contribution, I will take the view that a corpus-based and computational approach to phraseology may shed some new light on this theoretical conundrum. A better understanding of the basic units of meaning is necessary for more efficient language learning and translation, especially in the case of machine translation. Previous research (Colson 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014), Corpas Pastor (2000, 2007, 2008, 2013, 2015), Corpas Pastor & Leiva Rojo (2011), Leiva Rojo (2013), has shown the paramount importance of phraseology for translation. A tentative step towards a coherent explanation of the role of phraseology in language has been proposed by Mejri (2006): it is postulated that a third articulation of language intervenes at the level of words, including simple morphemes, sequences of free and bound morphemes, but also phraseological units. I will present results from experiments with statistical associations of morphemes across several languages, and point out that (mainly) isolating languages such as Chinese are interesting for a better understanding of the interplay between morphemes and phraseological units. Named entities, in particular, are an extreme example of intertwining cultural, statistical and linguistic elements. Other examples show that the many borrowings and influences that characterize European languages tend to give a somewhat blurred vision of the interplay between morphology and phraseology. From a statistical point of view, the cpr-score (Colson 2016) provides a methodology for adapting the automatic extraction of phraseological units to the morphological structure of each language. The results obtained can therefore be used for testing hypotheses about the interaction between morphology, phraseology and culture. Experiments with the cpr-score on the extraction of Chinese phraseological units show that results depend on how the basic units of meaning are defined: a morpheme-based approach yields good results, which corroborates the claim by Beck and Mel'čuk (2011) that the association of morphemes into words may be similar to the association of words into phraseological units. A cross-linguistic experiment carried out for English, French, Spanish and Chinese also reveals that the results are quite compatible with Mejri’s hypothesis (2006) of a third articulation of language. Such findings, if confirmed, also corroborate the notion of statistical semantics in language. To illustrate this point, I will present the PhraseoRobot (Colson 2016), a computational tool for extracting phraseological associations around key words from the media, such as Brexit. The results confirm a previous study on the term globalization (Colson 2016): a significant part of sociolinguistic associations prevailing in the media is related to phraseology in the broad sense, and can therefore be partly extracted by means of statistical scores. References Beck, D. & I. Mel'čuk (2011). Morphological phrasemes and Totonacan verbal morphology. Linguistics 49/1: 175-228. Colson, J.-P. (2011). La traduction spécialisée basée sur les corpus : une expérience dans le domaine informatique. In : Sfar, I. & S. Mejri, La traduction de textes spécialisés : retour sur des lieux communs. Synergies Tunisie n° 2. Gerflint, Agence universitaire de la Francophonie, p. 115-123. Colson, J.-P. (2012). Traduire le figement en langue de spécialité : une expérience de phraséologie informatique. In : Mogorrón Huerta, P. & S. Mejri (dirs.), Lenguas de especialidad, traducción, fijación / Langues spécialisées, figement et traduction. Encuentros Mediterráneos / Rencontres Méditerranéennes, N°4. Universidad de Alicante, p. 159-171. Colson, J.-P. (2013). Pratique traduisante et idiomaticité : l’importance des structures semi-figées. In : Mogorrón Huerta, P., Gallego Hernández, D., Masseau, P. & Tolosa Igualada, M. (eds.), Fraseología, Opacidad y Traduccíon. Studien zur romanischen Sprachwissenschaft und interkulturellen Kommunikation (Herausgegeben von Gerd Wotjak). Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang, p. 207-218. Colson, J.-P. (2014). La phraséologie et les corpus dans les recherches traductologiques. Communication lors du colloque international Europhras 2014, Association Européenne de Phraséologie. Université de Paris Sorbonne, 10-12 septembre 2014. Colson, J-P. (2016). Set phrases around globalization : an experiment in corpus-based computational phraseology. In: F. Alonso Almeida, I. Ortega Barrera, E. Quintana Toledo and M. Sánchez Cuervo (eds.), Input a Word, Analyse the World: Selected Approaches to Corpus Linguistics. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, p. 141-152. Corpas Pastor, G. (2000). Acerca de la (in)traducibilidad de la fraseología. In: G. Corpas Pastor (ed.), Las lenguas de Europa: Estudios de fraseología, fraseografía y traducción. Granada: Comares, p. 483-522. Corpas Pastor, G. (2007). Europäismen - von Natur aus phraseologische Äquivalente? Von blauem Blut und sangre azul. In: M. Emsel y J. Cuartero Otal (eds.), Brücken: Übersetzen und interkulturelle Kommunikationen. Festschrift für Gerd Wotjak zum 65. Geburtstag, Fráncfort: Peter Lang, p. 65-77. Corpas Pastor, G. (2008). Investigar con corpus en traducción: los retos de un nuevo paradigma [Studien zur romanische Sprachwissenschaft und interkulturellen Kommunikation, 49], Fráncfort: Peter Lang. Corpas Pastor, G. (2013). Detección, descripción y contraste de las unidades fraseológicas mediante tecnologías lingüísticas. In Olza, I. & R. Elvira Manero (eds.) Fraseopragmática. Berlin: Frank & Timme, p. 335-373. Leiva Rojo, J. (2013). La traducción de unidades fraseológicas (alemán-español/español-alemán) como parámetro para la evaluación y revisión de traducciones. In: Mellado Blanco, C., Buján, P, Iglesias N.M., Losada M.C. & A. Mansilla (eds), La fraseología del alemán y el español: lexicografía y traducción. ELS, Etudes Linguistiques / Linguistische Studien, Band 11. München: Peniope, p. 31-42. Leiva Rojo, J. & G. Corpas Pastor (2011). Placing Italian idioms in a foreign milieu: a case study. In: Pamies Bertrán, A., Luque Nadal, L., Bretana, J. &; M. Pazos (eds), (2011). Multilingual phraseography. Second Language Learning and Translation Applications. Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Verlag (Colección: Phraseologie und Parömiologie, 28), p. 289-298. Martinet, A. (1966). Eléments de linguistique générale. Paris: Colin. Mejri, S. (2006). Polylexicalité, monolexicalité et double articulation. Cahiers de Lexicologie 2: 209-221.

Pragmatics, perceptions and strategies in Chinese college English learning

This study investigated Chinese College English students. perceptions of pragmatics, their pragmatic competence in selected speech acts, strategies they employed in acquiring pragmatic knowledge, as well as their general approach to learning English as a foreign language. The research was triggered by a national curriculum initiative that prioritizes the need for College English students to enhance their ability to use English effectively in different social interactions (Chinese College English Education and Supervisory Committee, 2007). The traditional "grammar-translation" and "examination-oriented" method is believed to have reduced Chinese College English students to what is dubbed "mute" and "deaf" language learners (Zhang, 2008; Zhao, 2009). Many students lack pragmatic knowledge on how to interpret discourse by relating utterances to their meanings, understanding the intention of language users, and how language is used in specific settings (Bachman & Palmer, 1996, 2010). There is an increasing body of literature on awareness-raising of the importance of pragmatic knowledge and strategies for classroom instruction. However, to date, researchers have tended to focus largely on the teaching of pragmatics, rather than on how students acquire pragmatic competence (Bardovi-Harlig & Dornyei, 1998; Du, 2004; Hou, 2007; Ruan, 2007; Schauer, 2009). It is this gap in the research that this study fills, with a focus on different types of pragmatic knowledge, learner perceptions of such knowledge, and learning strategies that College English students employ in the process of learning English in general, and pragmatics in particular. Three strands of theories of second language acquisition (Ellis, 1985, 1994): pragmatics (Levinson, 1983; Mey, 2001; Yule, 1996), intercultural communications (Kramsch, 1998; Samovar & Porter, 1997; Samovar, Porter & McDaniel, 2009) and English as a lingua franca (ELF) (Canagarajah, 2006; Firth, 1996; Pennycook, 2010) were employed to establish a conceptual framework for data collection and analyses. Key constructs derived from the three related theories helped to form a typology for a detailed examination and theorization of the empirical evidence gathered from different sources. Four research instruments: a questionnaire (N=237), Discourse Completion Tasks (DCTs) (N=55), focus group interviews (N=18), and a textbook tasks analysis were employed to collect data for this systematic inquiry. Data collected by different instruments were analyzed and compared by way of a triangulation to enhance its validity and reliability. Major findings derived from different sources highlighted that, although College English students were grammatically advanced language learners, they displayed limited pragmatic knowledge and a highly restricted repertoire of language learning strategies. The majority of the respondents, however, believed that pragmatic knowledge was as important as linguistic knowledge in the process of developing communicative competence for interaction in different contexts. It was argued that a combination of a less than sufficient English proficiency, limited knowledge of pragmatics, inadequate language materials and tasks, and a small stock of language learning strategies, were a major hindrance to effective learning and communication, resulting in pragmatic failures in many intercultural communication situations. As the first systematic study of how Chinese College English students learned pragmatics, the research provided a solid empirical base for developing a tentative model for the learning of pragmatics in a College English classroom in China and similar educational contexts. The model was strengthened by a unique combination of theories of pragmatics, intercultural communication and ELF. Findings from this research provided insights into how Chinese College English students perceived pragmatics in the English as foreign language (EFL) curriculum, the processes of learning, as well as strategies they utilized in developing linguistic and pragmatic knowledge and competence.