The extent to which genre identity can be established by computational means will be explored. Overall the unit shows how empirical data from computer corpora can complement other forms of linguistic description. This unit surveys areas of meaning that are central to the grammar of any language and explores how these areas of meaning are grammaticalised in different languages, identifying patterns of congruence and incongruence across languages. The focus is on languages other than English, including Chinese, French, Japanese, Tagalog and Vietnamese. This unit is intended to help students develop descriptions of languages other than English and to work in a multilingual context, as in translation.
Language is a network of choices available to speakers.
The issues, therefore, relate to fields as diverse as grammar, aesthetics, cultural studies, cognitive science, and speech pathology. Many kinds of linguistic analysis will contribute to understanding such cultural phenomena - for example, the patterns of process type, or thematic prominence, or mood selection in the grammar. But none of the singular linguistic statements can provide the power of cultural insight that is produced when we inter-relate structure statements from the levels of context, semantics and lexicogrammar. The theory and practice of this interrelation of linguistics statement will constitute the core of this course. It is grounded in an analysis of the theoretical and methodological issues common to linguistics and anthropology.