Looking back or looking forward in corpus linguistics:what can the last 20 years suggest about the next?

Starting with a description of the software and hardware used for corpus linguistics in the late 1980s to early 1990s, this contribution discusses difficulties faced by the software designer when attempting to allow users to study text. Future human-machine interfaces may develop to be much more sophisticated, and certainly the aspects of text which can be studied will progress beyond plain text without images. Another area which will develop further is the study of patternings involving not just single words but word-relations across large stretches of text.

French linguistics research and teaching in UK and Irish HE institutions

Introduction: The research and teaching of French linguistics in UK higher education (HE) institutions have a venerable history; a number of universities have traditionally offered philology or history of the language courses, which complement literary study. A deeper understanding of the way that the phonology, syntax and semantics of the French language have evolved gives students linguistic insights that dovetail with their study of the Roman de Renart, Rabelais, Racine or the nouveau roman. There was, in the past, some coverage of contemporary French phonetics but little on sociolinguistic issues. More recently, new areas of research and teaching have been developed, with a particular focus on contemporary spoken French and on sociolinguistics. Well supported by funding councils, UK researchers are also making an important contribution in other areas: phonetics and phonology, syntax, pragmatics and second-language acquisition. A fair proportion of French linguistics research occurs outside French sections in psychology or applied linguistics departments. In addition, the UK plays a particular role in bringing together European and North American intellectual traditions and methodologies and in promoting the internationalisation of French linguistics research through the strength of its subject associations, and that of the Journal of French Language Studies. The following sections treat each of these areas in turn. History of the French Language There is a long and distinguished tradition in Britain of teaching and research on the history of the French language, particularly, but by no means exclusively, at the universities of Cambridge, Manchester and Oxford.

Exploiting heterogeneous scientific literature networks to combat ranking bias:evidence from the computational linguistics area

It is important to help researchers find valuable papers from a large literature collection. To this end, many graph-based ranking algorithms have been proposed. However, most of these algorithms suffer from the problem of ranking bias. Ranking bias hurts the usefulness of a ranking algorithm because it returns a ranking list with an undesirable time distribution. This paper is a focused study on how to alleviate ranking bias by leveraging the heterogeneous network structure of the literature collection. We propose a new graph-based ranking algorithm, MutualRank, that integrates mutual reinforcement relationships among networks of papers, researchers, and venues to achieve a more synthetic, accurate, and less-biased ranking than previous methods. MutualRank provides a unified model that involves both intra- and inter-network information for ranking papers, researchers, and venues simultaneously. We use the ACL Anthology Network as the benchmark data set and construct the gold standard from computer linguistics course websites of well-known universities and two well-known textbooks. The experimental results show that MutualRank greatly outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors, including PageRank, HITS, CoRank, Future Rank, and P-Rank, in ranking papers in both improving ranking effectiveness and alleviating ranking bias. Rankings of researchers and venues by MutualRank are also quite reasonable.

The Routledge handbook of forensic linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics provides a unique work of reference to the leading ideas, debates, topics, approaches and methodologies in Forensic Linguistics. Forensic Linguistics is the study of language and the law, covering topics from legal language and courtroom discourse to plagiarism. It also concerns the applied (forensic) linguist who is involved in providing evidence, as an expert, for the defence and prosecution, in areas as diverse as blackmail, trademarks and warning labels. The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics includes a comprehensive introduction to the field written by the editors and a collection of thirty-seven original chapters written by the world’s leading academics and professionals, both established and up-and-coming, designed to equip a new generation of students and researchers to carry out forensic linguistic research and analysis. The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics is the ideal resource for undergraduates or postgraduates new to the area.

Forensic linguistics : the application of language description in legal contexts

In this article I first divide Forensic Linguistics into three sub-disciplines: the language of written legal texts, the spoken language of legal proceedings, and the linguist as expert witness and then go on to give a small number of examples of the research undertaken in these three areas. For the language of written legal texts, I present work on the (in) comprehensibility of police cautions and of judges instructions to juries. For the spoken language of legal proceedings, I report work on the problems of interpreted interaction, of vulnerable witnesses and the need for more detailed research comparing the interactive rules in adversarial and investigative systems. Finally, to illustrate the role of the linguist as expert witness I report a trademark case, five different authorship attribution cases, three very different plagiarism cases and I end reporting briefly the contribution of linguists to language assessment techniques used in the linguistic classification of asylum seekers. © Langage et société no 132 - juin 2010.

A teoria e a prática: a questão da diferençano discurso sobre e da sala de aula

The main purpose of this paper is to question the relationship between theory and practice or basic and applied research in the domain of Applied Linguistics and classroom discourse. In order to achieve our aim, some theoretical texts, some recorded and transcribed classes as well as some teachers and students opinions about reading and writing were analysed. Results have shown that 1) practice is not the direct application of theoretical data: the relationship between them is not as simple as some applied linguists seem to believe because of the action of the unconscious in the constitution of subjectivity; 2) the conceptualization of the theoretical issues takes place in a confused and disorderly manner mixed up with personal experiences and previous knowledge (practice). We intend to question the fact that practice comes as secondary to theory.

Formas de Funcionalismo na Sintaxe

This article shows that the term functionalism, very often understood as a single or uniform approach in linguistics, has to be understood in its different perspectives. I start by presenting an opposing conception similar to the I-language vs E-language in Chomsky (1986). As in the latter conception , language can be understood as an abstract model of a mind internal mechanism responsible for language production and perception or, as in the former one, it can be the description of the external use of language. Also like with formalists , there are functionalists who look for cross-linguistic variation (and universals of language use) and functionalists who look for language internal variation. It is also shown that functionalists can differ in the extent to which social variables are considered in the explanation of linguistic form.

Lingüística e arqueologia

This retrospective paper will shed light on the relations between Linguistics and Archaeology by drawing special attention to the history of Archaeology and the influence of Linguistic models for the development of archaeological interpretive frameworks. Reference will be made to culture history theoreticians, like Gordon Childe, to processual archaeologists influenced by Structuralism and to post-processual discourse analysis. The paper will conclude stressing the importance of Linguistics to archaeological thought.

A lingüística indígena no Brasil

This article presents a panorama of the area of the linguistics of the indigenous languages in Brazil within the discipline of Brazilian linguiistics as a whole. Special attention is given to those aspects related to its specific development. It is argued that in contrast to what is commonly supposed, the arrival of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (1959) not only was not the beginning of this area of study in the country, but it even contributed to the delay in its establishment. It was only after the return of Brazilian scholars educated abroad who were interested in the study of the national indigenous languages that a specialized branch of linguistics directed to the study of these languages began to take form. The present situation of the area and perspectives for future development are both explored.

Importância do fonoaudiólogo no acompanhamento de indivíduos com hipotireoidismo congênito

TEMA: o hipotireoidismo congênito é uma alteração metabólica que traz conseqüência graves para indivíduos não tratados e mesmo as crianças que realizam o tratamento podem apresentar distúrbios do desenvolvimento. O Programa Nacional de Triagem Neonatal, instituído pelo Ministério da Saúde, prevê o acompanhamento longitudinal de indivíduos com equipe multidisciplinar. Entretanto, a Fonoaudiologia não é incluída nesta equipe. Deste modo, considerando a ocorrência de distúrbios da comunicação nestes indivíduos, realizou-se levantamento bibliográfico nas bases de dados Lilacs, MedLine e PubMed, no período de 1987 a 2007, referente às alterações em habilidades do desenvolvimento decorrentes do hipotireoidismo congênito. OBJETIVO: verificar, na literatura científica, presença de alterações do desenvolvimento em indivíduos com hipotireoidismo congênito e refletir sobre a importância da atuação fonoaudiológica, em conjunto com equipe multidisciplinar especializada, no acompanhamento dos mesmos. CONCLUSÃO: a literatura relata alterações nas habilidades do desenvolvimento (motoras, cognitivas, lingüísticas e de autocuidados) e destaca que crianças com hipotireoidismo congênito são de risco para alterações no desenvolvimento lingüístico e, portanto, necessitam do acompanhamento longitudinal do desenvolvimento comunicativo. Torna-se evidente a importância da atuação do fonoaudiólogo nos Programas de Triagem Neonatal credenciados pelo Ministério da Saúde. Ressalta-se ainda a necessidade de investigações referentes às outras alterações metabólicas contempladas nestes programas, nas quais o fonoaudiólogo pode atuar de modo a prevenir, habilitar e reabilitar os distúrbios da comunicação, contribuindo para o trabalho em equipe, promovendo saúde nesta população.

Inserção de graduados em fonoaudiologia de uma universidade pública em programas de pós-graduação

OBJETIVO: caracterizar a inserção de egressos do Curso de Fonoaudiologia da Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP) - Marília, em Programas de Pós-Graduação (PPG) Stricto Sensu brasileiros. MÉTODO: foram utilizadas listas de graduados e Curriculum Vitae do egresso e do orientador. RESULTADOS: dos 537 formados, 16,57% cursaram/estavam cursando PPG e destes, 98,88% em mestrado e 37,08% também em doutorado. Na grande área de conhecimento, 50% dos egressos de mestrado vincularam-se predominantemente a programas em Ciências da Saúde, 31,80% em Ciências Humanas e 13,64% em Linguística, Letras e Artes. No doutorado, 33, 33% em Ciências Humanas, 30,30% em Ciências da Saúde e em Linguística, Letras e Artes. Quanto à área de conhecimento, predominou a vinculação, no mestrado, de 30,68% em Fonoaudiologia, 28,41% em Educação, 13,64% em Linguística e 9,09% em Medicina I; e, no doutorado, de 33,33% em Educação, 30,30% em Linguística e 9,09% em Fonoaudiologia; 55,68% dissertações e 51,52% teses focalizaram a linguagem. A UNESP predominou com 39,77% no mestrado e 48,48% no doutorado. Predominou a vinculação a Programas com conceito 4 para 52,27% dos egressos do mestrado e 45,45% do doutorado. Quando constou a informação (55,68%), todos receberam fomento. O Teste de Razão de Verossimilhança não indicou diferenças significativas dos percentuais obtidos entre o mestrado e o doutorado. CONCLUSÃO: os resultados superaram os apresentados para o mesmo Estado, mostraram a característica interdisciplinar da Ciência Fonoaudiológica e o predomínio de temática em linguagem.

Migração e referenciais identificatórios: linguagem e preconceito

A ausência de diálogos no mundo massificado impõe um discurso padronizado. Tenta-se eliminar as diferenças e os limites que estruturam as identidades são ameaçados. A violência desse mundo joga para a periferia grandes segmentos da população, condenados a viver em condições desumanas. Migrantes e imigrantes, desenraizados dos fundamentos de suas identidades, constituem parte expressiva dessa população. Grandes metrópoles, como São Paulo, são verdadeiros lócus do embate intercultural que os ameaça. Nossa discussão se apóia em trabalho de pesquisa anterior com crianças nordestinas em escolas paulistas - pudemos constatar o preconceito, a humilhação que atingem essa população. O ponto de partida para a humilhação é, quase sempre, sua linguagem regional, vista como errada e inadequada. A lingüística e a sociolingüística nos mostram o contrário. Entretanto, tudo que enraíza e fortalece a identidade é negado. A “barbárie civilizada” destrói desejo, sonhos, esperança, alteridade.