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This chapter offers reflections on the conceptual dimension of our everyday choices expressed through language. Thus, the chapter focuses on communicative aspects of choice manifested at the fundamental level, where verbal acts of discrimination or differentiation between entities are performed. It is argued that any verbal act of oral or written communication entails the selection of one particular meaningful element instead of another in a specific linear sequence. Linearity is inescapably related to a natural language. As speakers, we are constantly facing the problem of choice, whether at the level of lexis or grammar. The acts of choosing are as entrenched in our daily experience as other fundamental acts like breathing or hearing, except that they are volitional. choice is consistently seen in this chapter as a conceptual representation of our lexical instantiations of choices/decisions that we undertake as humans every day. The chapter closes by capturing the fundamental conceptual relations between cube, language, and choice.

This chapter aims to investigate the features of abusive and hateful comments in Lithuanian news portals and to outline potential classifiers of hate speech (HS). Building on previous work [Ruzaitė. In Search of Hate Speech. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 14(1): 93–116 (2018). 10.1515/lpp-2018-0005], this study applies the framework of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis to investigate a database of over 10,000 comments written on controversial issues. The results reveal some features of verbal aggression typical of both abusive and HS comments (e.g., racial slurs and vulgar lexis, especially in comments targeting LGBT people). Their pragmatic force is further modified through modal verbs, verbs with negative semantic meaning in the imperative form, (offensive) vocatives, and neologisms. Comments containing HS are marked by a higher degree of creativity and are often based on pseudo-argumentation, which poses challenges for automated HS detection.

Several studies have described the most frequent features of visual art audio description (AD), but less frequent or minority features have received less attention. This article offers a description and discussion of minority features in visual art AD as instances of more creative practices that can foster a variety of experiences for the diversity of users of this type of intersemiotic translation. For this purpose, a qualitative analysis of a multilingual corpus of visual art ADs and their context of creation and implementation was carried out, drawing on Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar (1987/2008) and its further development by Croft and Cruse (2004). The results show that some ADs conceptualize the artwork as a process and utilize an internal viewpoint. The focus of attention is sometimes shifted to the technique or the subjective impressions elicited by the work, with a few ADs showing especially high levels of subjectivity. In a group of ADs, universal accessibility translates into low specificity, understood as the amount of information and detail. The prevalent constitution of the work is altered so the identification is postponed, and the interconnections between the visual components are profiled. The typical general-to-specific progression is not followed and, instead, the AD imitates the artwork’s composition. In a small number of ADs, the location of the visual components is not conveyed through lexis but implied in the discourse sequence, while the paralinguistic features of voice tempo, tone, and intensity are utilized to translate the composition and sensory impressions elicited by the artwork.

In this paper, we attempted to find speech features of different reactions to frustration to detect and classify them in social media texts. Frustration is a highly motivated situation in which it is impossible to achieve a goal when unexpected external or internal obstacles are encountered to meet the need. We use a well-recognized typology of the reactions and focus on context-aware but straightforward models and classification features, which can be easily interpreted. The experiments show that pure lexis cannot be used as the only feature for the classification. Only the models, which combine different-level linguistic features, implicitly like in BERT or in the models with the linguistic patterns, provide fair results. From a psychological point of view, some misclassifications of the obtained reaction data can be related to their assignment to one class of extrapunitive reactions. Discussions in social networks suggest a high level of human activity, a desire to seek a solution to the problem in a broader social interaction. Thus, the focus on extrapunitive reactions and an increased emotional component in the form of aggression is a feature of that interaction type. On the one hand, we provide a method to classify the social network messages; on the other hand, the training results can be interpreted and analyzed by experts in psychodiagnostics.

Automation of languages was not always associated with mathematisation. Soviet linguistics, British linguistics and French structuralist linguistics used quite different modes of integration. The way they automated translation, based on lexicon and semantics and anchored in specific linguistic and cultural traditions, gave rise to new issues, or revived old ones, allowing new objects to emerge from the language sciences. Rather than be obliged to integrate a new horizon of retrospection imposed on them from outside, within a short period of time these approaches inscribed the automation of language in long-term history. Part 1 discusses the English and Russian cases, both using intermediary language, whereas part 2 studies the French case that is built around lexis.

In this paper a brief description of the developed system of informational support for innovative activity in the Republic of Kazakhstan is given. The system is being developed as information portal, which provides navigation within national and global information space by expression of metadata about information resources, which are relevant to the user’s task. Using the expressed data, the user improves his professional competencies, obtains new knowledge and he is able to use it for decision making process. The base of the system is used for generation of new knowledge which are supposed to enrich the corporative knowledge of the enterprise. Therefore, the corporative system of the knowledge management is proposed to consider as final element of information support infrastructure. During the development of such systems for data expression, classical ontology model is traditionally used. The core of the model is descriptor dictionary providing coverage of lexis of specific monothematical subject field. The problem is considered that in practice there is polythematical knowledge leading to difficulty of development and following integration of complex of thematical thesauruses and matching of local ontologies. In order to solve this problem, the approach for polythematical knowledge management based on the use of classification type languages is proposed. In this case, a thematic rubricator is introduced into the ontology model instead of a thesaurus, where each category (rubric) has its own code, name and set of keywords, characterizing its thematic content. The proposed joint use of existing Russian thematic rubricators allows to increase the accuracy of knowledge presentation, as well as take advantage of establishing the associative relations between different classification systems. Additionally, there the possibility of verbal knowledge description in terms of keywords, characterizing the content of subject entries and words from the rubric’s titles, is maintained.

In the LEXIS project, a tsunami and earthquake large scale pilot is being deployed on top of an innovative HPC/Cloud orchestration layer, combining real-time deadlines, high performance simulations and cloud processing. To handle this, we have relied on a suitable model of computation oriented towards performance and real-time requirements, and used it to model, map and integrate the pilot workflow over the LEXIS orchestration and data exchanges technologies. This paper describes how the model of computation expresses real-time constraints over workflows, how such a model can be used to compute the necessary resources for a target latency and quality of service, and how the LEXIS orchestration layer is extended to offer the necessary features to implement this workflow.

In his study of persuasion in corporate annual reports, Vogel sees evaluative lexis as its prime realisation. Focusing on narrative sections, namely the letter to shareholders and reviews in the strategic report, the chapter identifies correlation between the degree of persuasiveness of individual text types and the frequency of positively connoted evaluative lexis. Claiming that negatively connoted lexis is largely dispreferred, Vogel demonstrates how a frequent overlap with a concurrent terminological function or useful contrast with positive lexis explains choices of words with negative connotations. Along with value markers, including epistemic ones such as hedges and boosters, self-mentions are found to be efficient persuasive means, especially in Anglophone reports.

Critical and radical perspectives on the condition of University seem to share the language of bruising war between the powers of good and evil. Academia is in chains, under siege, and is being constantly assaulted from the air and ground. In such conditions, allied forces aimed at retaking higher education gather in a specific mode, an offensive mode, the mode of striking back. This lexis and these metaphors pre-frame the situations in which university staff meet within academia. Based on qualitative, phenomenography-oriented, in-depth interviews, the author makes an attempt to problematise – often taking for granted – the idea of meeting and presents the results of his research showing that meetings can take five different forms (from offensive to appreciative mutual understanding) resulting in (re)creating various and varied university cultures. In the final part of the article the author presents possible “interpretation paths” in the form of the spectres of the university.

Adopting an intercultural rhetoric approach to the analysis of persuasion, Dontcheva-Navratilova, Adam, Povolna and Vogel study the common tendencies and divergences in the conveyance of persuasive intents in Anglophone and Czech academic, business, religious and technical discourses. Based on the assumption that value systems and functional needs differ across linguacultural backgrounds, specialised discourses and genres, this chapter explores how persuasion is enhanced by self-mention and reader reference instrumental in evoking the ethical appeal, directives supporting the logical development of the argument, and questions, exclamations and evaluative lexis used to address the emotions of the audience. The comparative analysis clearly shows that variation in the use of persuasive language is motivated by differences in cultural and rhetorical traditions, as well as by the specificity of the two languages.

Remarkable achievements have been made in the study of lexis in general Chinese, such as lexical meanings, word structures, lexical systems, and semantic evolution. However, these studies can hardly reflect the unique characteristics of Chinese for special purposes, such as legal Chinese, travel Chinese, and business Chinese. Taking the commonly used word 管理 guǎnlǐ ‘manage; management’ as an example, this paper explores the characteristics of legislative Chinese in terms of semantic categories and saliency of collocations by comparing them in a legislative Chinese corpus and the BCC corpus. This study finds that 管理 guǎnlǐ ‘manage; management’ is mainly used as a modifier and a modified term in legislative Chinese. The collocated words cover less semantic categories compared to general Chinese. Most of the collocated words are nouns, whose semantic categories mainly come from the political, social and economic fields. The study of the usage of commonly used words in legislative Chinese can not only help to explore the characteristics of legislative Chinese itself and its differences compared with general Chinese, but also provide references for law revision, legal lexicography, and legal Chinese teaching.

Huawei, a major Chinese player in 5G mobile communication infrastructure and equipment, has caused many national security concerns among the Western countries. Using a computational framing approach, this study aims to examine how global news organizations frame Huawei. This study depends on a media corpus of 1527 articles from Nexis UNI (previously Lexis/Nexis Academic) database after using “Huawei” and “national security” as the keyword pair. Prominent key phrases include “national security,” “security concerns,” “security threat,” and “security fears” among non-Chinese media, while Chinese media focus on “trade war,” “Donald Trump,” and (the arrest) of Huawei’s CFO, “Meng Wanzhou.” Linear regression analyses also confirmed the positive relationship between a country’s animosity against China with how Huawei will be framed by news organizations. Increased animosity perceptions against China are found to be positively associated with more likely to frame Huawei with national security and security fear concerns.

In this chapter, I shine the spotlight on the teacher’s best-loved self. I begin by tracing my journey to discovering the unnamed phenomenon in my own and others’ research programs. My ongoing search eventually led to the lexis, the best-loved self, an apt phrase Schwab used to signify that teachers are more than the subject matter they teach. I then interweave concepts and ideas from other researchers who arrived at similar understandings. After that, I dive deeply into my own research program and examine expressions of the best-loved self in the experiential accounts of Daryl, Bernadette, Helen, and Anna Dean, together with Ashley Thomas, Shi Tan, and other teachers who have appeared in my published works. Lastly, I capture expressions of my best-loved self in the context of my professional life.

This chapter reports on the rebranding of a British cancer charity as part of a wider internal culture change. During the cultural change process, management became aware that it was not reaching a particular socio-demographic group of cancer patients and sought to adjust the organisation’s brand identity. The first step of the brand-related consultancy involved identifying the brand personality projected in the charity’s existing materials. An analysis of lexis, transitivity and visuals showed that the organisation projected a classed and gendered brand personality that diverged from the group they were trying to reach. The second step involved developing a new brand personality through linguistic adaptation. The project concluded with a follow-up language audit some months after the new brand had been implemented. The chapter ends by discussing the wider impact of the project on the client and reflecting on the collaboration between linguists and third-sector organisations.

The current paper refers to peculiar features of scientific and scientific and popular texts on construction economics. Among those being regarded here, there are professional text coherence and cohesion. Constructio economic terminology is an example of several scientific field integrations and interrelations, made up of construction and economic term aggregates, correlated with these science notion systems. Term is a word or word combination used in professional language, aimed at detonating special notions or objects characterized by normativity, systematicity, definitivity and precision. National language terminology enrichment is predominantly made up due to terminologization of word combinations, forming in turn compound terms. Professional lexis plays a special role among the lexical means of cohesion connection in professional texts. It is an important tool of actualization of identity, opposition, implication, particular and common, class, variety, etc. The term’s important feature is its ability to be the key cohesion component of professional texts. Term’s cohesion function provides discursive cohesiveness of professional construction economic text organization. Discursive importunateness of cohesive lexis consists in its ability to connect terms into nominative construction.

Nomen structure in special terminology is one of the main issues in modern linguistics. It is one of the numerous language groups which attracts interest of philologists and can be the basis for studying in the context of various professional formats. The criterion for distinguishing between a term and a nomen is the consideration of their roles in the field of special communication. For differentiation between terms and nomens, the following functions are used: identification, labeling, subjectivity, motivation, nomination, etc. Nomen structure is considered as a typical form of professional knowledge which possesses all these functions and contains grapheme and digital components, in contrast to the term. Through the application of the terminological analysis of numerous nomen structures in English pipeline terminology, an attempt is made to identify the main characteristics of nomens in professional sphere. In addition, the analysis presented in the work allows conclusions about the linguistic design of nomens and clarification of the near-and-far periphery of terminological nomenclature.

Race, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity are commonly considered the cornerstones of our identity, they are the first most visible or perceivable signs of what R. T. Lakoff qualifies as a person’s “major identity” (Lakoff 2006, p. 143). Such signs, however, often remain on the surface, as mere categories or taxonomical groupings; an individual or indeed a nation’s core identity often resides at a deeper, less conspicuous level: “minor identities, like culinary preferences and sophistication contribute significantly to our sense of ourselves: who we are, how competent we are, who our friends are or should be, whom we admire or disdain” (Lakoff 2006, p. 165). The present study aims to investigate the manner in which food, and culinary prowess, can serve to bring together individuals belonging to different nations and cultures within a Community of Practice (Eckert and Wenger 2005), a sort of macro-identitary category, which breaks down linguistic, cultural and nationalistic divides and forges emotional bonds that spring from a common appreciation of good food. This study investigates the original (American) and dubbed (Italian) versions of the film Eat Pray Love, with the main focus on the first part of the film Eat, which takes place in Italy. Though the film is not renowned for its critical acclaim, it is felt that the focus on food as a means of crossing boundaries (including those pertaining to the act of translation itself) and building communities, makes this audio-visual product worthy of study. The idea of ‘crossing’, seen as both physical and linguistic diasporic transferal, is in fact the leitmotif that runs through the entire film. Indeed, it is through the very visceral, shared emotions which stem from sharing good food and drink that the main character Elizabeth Gilbert (Julia Roberts) is accepted within the Italian community. It must be said that the manner in which these shared emotions are portrayed in the American and Italian versions differs considerably, thus close attention will be paid to the many markers of identity discourse such as culture-bound terms, specialised lexis, code-mixing, code-switching and phonetic variation.

Lexis Advance is a legal research service provided by LexisNexis that can respond to natural language queries. It includes a module called Lexis Answers which implements advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities to improve understanding of the intent of the user’s queries. Lexis Answers can respond to natural language questions concerning legal question types such as statute of limitations, elements of a claim, definition of legal terms, and others. Herein, we report on the successful use of advanced NLP approaches for detecting not only named entities, but entire legal phrases, a skill previously requiring domain knowledge and human expertise. We have utilized the Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) approach that employs hand-engineered features combined with word2vec embeddings trained on legal corpus. Furthermore, to reduce our dependency on hand-engineered features, we have also implemented deep learning architecture comprising of bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) and linear chain CRF. Both approaches were benchmarked against a rule-based approach for different types of legal questions. We find that both CRF and BiLSTM-CRF can identify query intents and legal concepts with comparable precision but much higher recall and F-score than the baseline. The resulting models have been employed in Lexis Answers as critical improvement in our natural language query understanding.

Flight crewmembers utilize checklists during typical phases of flight, which may also encompass non-normal conditions. Written English language on checklists combined with crew alerting can be used by flight crewmembers to read and comprehend system related issues, and respond to system conditions on the flight deck. Design and integration of English language on checklists and alerting systems should provide information that can be utilized for flight decision-making purposes. English language can be challenging for English as-a-second language flight crewmembers. Review of literature suggests that ESL adults experience fundamental challenges with reading and interpreting written English language text corpora based on their background knowledge, English language proficiency, and contextual use of written English language in airline operations. This paper provides a survey of ESL flight crew performance issues when they use checklists and alerting systems during non-normal conditions. Survey results indicated that flight crewmember use of written English language checklists has an impact on their performance in airline operations. Design and integration of written English language on checklists and alerting systems were factors leading to ESL flight crewmember procedural divergence and misunderstandings. Flight crewmembers’ metacognitive strategy use, background knowledge, and their English language proficiency (reading comprehension level), were factors that impacted their performance and flight safety. Future studies should focus on ESL flight crewmember use of written English language on checklists and alerting systems and impact on flight crewmember performance in airline operations.

This work tackles the problem of modeling author style in Russian. In particular, we solve the task of authorship attribution using the collected dataset of 30 authors, 1506 texts written in the period of 18th–21st century. We apply various approaches to solving the attribution problem: Random Forest, Logistic Regression, SVM Classifier. In terms of text representation, we use seven models in three language levels: lexis, morphology, and syntax. Most importantly, we propose our own set of morpho-syntactic features that perform on about the same level as doc2vec, but are fully interpretable. The conducted experiments show the effectiveness of their standalone use, as well as the increase in the quality of classification when using these attributes along with the classic doc2vec-based approach. All code, including feature extraction, is made freely available. Additionally, we analyze the performance of individual features as style markers. Finally, we study classification errors in order to identify the patterns in the misattribution of specific authors.

Widening participation in higher education and inclusivity policies have meant more university students with different cultural schemas for writing and varying levels of proficiency in academic English. In particular, international and migrant students may bring with them their own legitimate varieties of English. The authors of this chapter draw on a small project conducted at one Australian university which sought to investigate the use of World Englishes (WEs) in the written work of students who speak English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D) and the feedback given to these students by lecturers across disciplines. Findings revealed limited occurrences of features that could definitely be linked with WEs, particularly in the area of lexis. Likewise, there were few examples of lecturer feedback on the students’ use of WEs or WEs picked up as errors due to the use of standardised rubrics which did not have this capacity. Discussion points to the need for greater transcultural competence amongst academics in the tertiary sector against a backdrop of increased student numbers and shorter feedback turnaround times. It also suggests the need for students to be able to identify the boundary between dominant discourses in their disciplines and ways to negotiate standard forms to include their own language identities.

This chapter is concerned with establishing and analysing the discourses that shaped the coverage of the 2016 EU referendum in a selection of Scottish and Welsh newspapers. The chapter looks at the Scottish editions of the Daily Express and Daily Mail, as well as the Herald and the Daily Record. The Welsh papers examined are the Western Mail/Wales on Sunday, the Daily Post and the Evening Post. Using Lexis Nexis the chapter engages in a search for key terms across a three month sample of coverage, followed by a critical discourse analysis of how these are used. Discourses of danger and fear are found to be prominent themes across both samples, mirroring public discourse more broadly.

According to the lexical approach in language teaching, it is lexis which functions as the most important building block for communication. Therefore, it is of great importance to examine how vocabulary, also in the form of multiword lexical units, can be acquired most efficiently. Vocabulary learning strategies haven been a constant field of research since the 1970s, providing linguists and teachers with information about different cognitive vocabulary learning strategies. Additionally, language aptitude tests improved significantly since their development and were able to prove their validity. Studies showed that low aptitude learners drastically improved with the help of specific vocabulary acquisition strategies, whereas high aptitude learners did not benefit from such strategies. Taking this finding into consideration, this research investigates whether people with a lower language aptitude use particular cognitive strategies more frequently compared to persons with a higher aptitude. A questionnaire has been designed to measure people’s preferences for various cognitive vocabulary acquisition strategies. The questionnaire focuses on three well known and two little-known, but innovative, strategies: learning vocabulary with the help of pictorial representations, grouping corresponding words together, antonyms and synonyms, using physical actions accompanying vocabulary learning and the keyword method. A total of 19 German native speakers participated in the study. The LLAMA B test has been chosen to measure vocabulary acquisition aptitude. The research shows that low aptitude learners do not use significantly more cognitive vocabulary acquisition strategies than high aptitude learners.

This chapter focuses on the use of multiple corpora and word lists made from corpora to select ESP vocabulary and on the integration of that lexis into an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) course. The first part of the chapter discusses the compilation of a corpus of medical textbooks in English which are commonly used in many Latin American countries, such as Venezuela, in undergraduate medical courses. A second corpus, this time of general English, was used as a comparison to the medical textbook corpus. Both corpora were analyzed for vocabulary load using Nation’s (2012) BNC/COCA lists, Coxhead’s AWL (2000) and Coxhead and Hirsh’s (2007) Science List. The study found that the first 3000 words constitute a vital set of vocabulary for ESP medical students at the beginning of their studies and that the vocabulary load of the medical textbooks is far greater than the loads of university texts (see Nation 2006). Bringing these corpus-based findings into ESP courses is an important task. The second part of the chapter discussed integrating these findings into an ESP course for medical students, using Nation’s (2013) framework of planning, strategy training, testing, and teaching vocabulary.

This chapter summarizes and describes the chronological development of the demographic grid (known as the Lexis diagram). When the order of the presented versions of the diagram is not strictly chronological, the reason is for better context or possibility of direct comparison. All the introduced versions of the diagram are described and graphically illustrated. For all the versions of the diagrams (where possible), the primary sets of events are defined as well as the initial and exposed population sizes related to these primary sets. These terms are crucial for calculating the rates (number of events divided by the exposed population) or probabilities (number of events divided by the initial population size) in demography.

This chapter briefly introduces Wilhelm Lexis’ biography by focusing on his childhood, studies, and work life. Places relevant to him as well as his working positions and publications are also listed and described.

China now has the largest number of users of English in the world and this will probably lead to a distinctive Chinese variety of English. The features of China English were investigated in terms of lexis, pragmatics and syntactic structures and the data under investigation involved spoken discourse, media and literature, while few studies have brought advanced Chinese users’ English writing samples into focus in the perspective of World Englishes. This chapter investigates the syntactic features in terms of the patterns of the positions of subordinate clauses of China English, based on the data collected in 188 writing compositions written by advanced Chinese users of English. The four subordinators under investigation are because, although, if and when. Results show that Chinese users of English tend to place although-, because-, if- and when-subordinate clauses in the initial position, though they can be placed in an initial, medial or final position. I therefore argue that this preference by advanced Chinese users of English may be due to the transfer of Chinese and can be considered as instantiations of syntactic nativization in China English.

At the moment more advanced approaches to phonetic transcription are required for different speech technology tasks such as TTS or ASR. All subtle differences in phonetic characteristics of sound sequences inside the words and in the word boundaries need more accurate and variable transcription rules. Moreover, there is a need to take into account not only the normal rules of phonetic transcription. it is important to include the information about speech variability in regional and social dialects, popular speech and colloquial variants of the high frequency lexis. In this paper a reliable method for automatic phonetic transcription of Russian text is presented. The system is used for making not only an ideal transcription for the Russian text but also takes into account the complex processes of sound change and variation within the Russian standard pronunciation. Our transcribing system is reliable and could be used not only for the TTS systems but also in ASR tasks that require more flexible approach to phonetic transcription of the text.

This chapter investigates the lexis-grammar interface of Chinese English from a corpus linguistics perspective. Utilizing large-scale corpus data collected from an online discussion forum, we have focused on the prototypical ditransitive verb GIVE and examined its verb-complementation patterns, direct object slots collocates, the relationship between complementation patterns and collocates, and the relationship between collocates and verb tense. Using WordSmith Tools (Scott 2004, WordSmith tools (Version 4.0) [Computer software]. Oxford University Press, Oxford), we have randomly sampled and analyzed 500 uses of GIVE in the dataset. The results suggest that there exist certain associations between specific lexical items and grammatical constructions in Chinese English, an Expanding-Circle variety of English. The relationship between lexis and grammar, or lexicogrammar, as illustrated in the case study of GIVE, can be taken as a concrete instantiation of structural nativization in local varieties of English.

What makes a variety of English distinct from others lies not only in its phonology, lexis, syntax, discourse, and pragmatics, but also in the distinctive ways that its speakers encode their cultural conceptualisations. There has been considerable research on different varieties of English at both linguistic and cultural levels. In particular, over the last three to four decades, researchers have investigated features of Chinese English, perceptions of and attitudes towards Chinese English, as well as implications of Chinese English for English language teaching and intercultural communication involving Chinese speakers of English. However, a review of the literature reveals little research on cultural conceptualisations in Chinese English. ‘Cultural conceptualisations’ encompass cultural schemas, cultural categories, and cultural conceptual metaphors. In this chapter, we adopt a Cultural Linguistics approach to researching Chinese English, using cultural conceptualisations as a framework to analyse empirical data, including interviews, newspaper articles, textbooks, literary works by Chinese English authors, and online media articles in English about China. Towards the end of the chapter, we also explore implications of researching cultural conceptualisations in Chinese English for English language teaching (ELT) in China.

In this chapter I will be looking at discourse that apparently rejects western body image norms by constructing a norm of physical and psychological well-being instead. The analysis is based on a corpus of excerpts from 16 interviews with Portuguese women from two generations, mothers and daughters who were asked to describe how they thought the body influences the life of a woman. These excerpts were analysed using critical discourse analysis, with a focus on attitudinal lexis and modality. I suggest that an investigation of linguistic and discursive features shows that my interviewees constructed a link between body satisfaction; beauty image norms; monitoring processes; and disciplinary practices that maintain and reinforce the very same body image norms that they apparently reject.

Students at the advanced level of foreign language study often find it difficult to get motivated to work on their vocabulary development, because they believe that the knowledge of lexis they have at this stage makes it possible for them to express most meanings. They also know most, if not all, of the high frequency words and thus should concentrate on low frequency and academic vocabulary. Such vocabulary is more difficult to acquire due to the fact that items belonging to those two categories do not appear often enough in the input to which students are exposed to be learned incidentally. Because of this, some degree of explicit learning seems necessary. One of the many ways of motivating students to concentrate on vocabulary that a teacher can use is systematic review and testing. Even in this case, however, students often believe that the knowledge they already possess will be enough to get at least a pass mark. The present paper describes a procedure in which it is the students themselves who are responsible for selecting vocabulary items to be tested as well as providing their definitions and example sentences. As a result, a database of items is created from which tests and other materials can easily be generated. It is believed that in this case it is the process of working on the database rather than test-taking which is more valuable not only as a tool for vocabulary development but also as a way of fostering students’ autonomy.

The article presents the model of foreign vocabulary acquisition which consists of five consecutive stages, namely: (1) the filter, (2) phonological structure, (3) semantic structure, (4) retention and storage, (5) retrieval. The author discusses each of the stages from psycholinguistic point of view and supports his observations with the literature devoted to the problem of linguistic associations, meaningless associations etc.

The aim of this article is to outline key issues in assessing lexical richness, operationalized as consisting of four interrelated components: lexical sophistication, diversity, density and number of errors, as well as to present the results of a study aimed at providing insight into a possible relationship between selected aspects of lexical richness and general quality of learner texts. Compositions written by 65 English philology students were analyzed using two measures of lexical richness, namely diversity and sophistication. The results of the analysis were correlated with holistic scores for compositions, which included such components of assessment as content, organization and language control. Positive correlations were found between holistic scores for composition and the measure of lexical sophistication, but not between holistic scores and lexical diversity of texts. The paper will conclude with a discussion on the extent to which lexical richness influences general text quality, and implications of the results of the study for language instruction at the academic level.

As the title to this chapter suggests, demographers adopt either (or both) of two perspectives, or approaches, in analysing demographic data. They are the cohort approach to demographic analysis and the period approach to demographic analysis. The difference between these two approaches is most readily understood by making use of a graphical device known as the Lexis diagram. Named for Wilhelm Lexis (1837–1914), a German statistician, actuary and economist who was the first to use it, the Lexis diagram is also an invaluable tool for conceptualizing the construction of demographic measures and the procedures followed in demographic estimation and projection. The first part of this chapter is devoted to describing it and the concepts on which its use rests.

With the exception of medical schools or medical universities, English for Pharmaceutical Purposes is rarely taught as a specialist language course or ESP module at the university-level (e.g. designed specifically for training translators of specialist texts). This may be caused by, among other factors, the lack of comprehensive description of vocabulary and phraseology used across different pharmaceutical text types and genres, e.g. patient-pharmacist interactions, patient information leaflets, clinical trial protocols etc. This preliminary study is designed as an initial step to develop a description of vocabulary and phraseology, namely keywords, n-grams consisting of 4 words and phrase frames based on n-grams consisting of 4 words all used in clinical trial protocols and European public assessment reports written originally in English. The analyses are aimed to provide an initial description of the use of distinctive lexis and phraseology found in the said text varieties. The results offer new, yet still preliminary, data for further descriptions of English used for pharmaceutical purposes to be conducted in the future.

Research on the impact of immersion programmes on second language acquisition has generally shown benefits in comprehension and fluency, while lexico-grammatical accuracy has been found to lag behind. Nevertheless, empirical evidence on the development of lexico-grammatical competence in CLIL contexts is still scanty. Thus, the current study intends to shed new light on the growth of lexico-grammatical accuracy in lower secondary education CLIL learners. More specifically, it reports on two groups of Catalan-Spanish bilinguals (N = 105) in the Balearic Islands enrolled in year 2 at the start of the study (ages 13–14): (a) CLIL participants learning either science or social science through the medium of English (N = 70); and (b) non-CLIL informants (N = 35). Lexico-grammatical development is analysed on the basis of their performance on a cloze test and a fill-in-the-blanks tense-and-aspect test over a 3-year span. Our results indicate that the CLIL context appears to accelerate lexico-grammatical learning. However, CLIL learners do not surpass their non-CLIL peers when accumulated hours of instruction are equivalent. These findings point to the need for increased attention to form and integration of language and content in CLIL environments.

Data visualisation is the graphic presentation of data to reveal complex information at a glance (Steele and Iliinsky 2010). The challenge is to map data to a visual display that reveals the range of values of variables and relations between variables. Visualisation of data can be an effective introduction to formal statistical modelling. Ages at marriage may be displayed as points in a scatter plot to assess the distribution of ages and to identify outliers. The marriage duration of a person may be displayed as a line connecting age at marriage and current age or age at marriage dissolution. The end point may be marked if the marriage has been dissolved and not marked if the marriage is intact at the end of the observation period. Visualisation of life histories poses particular challenges. The first is conceptual. The life history is a multistage process of development in which stages create a basis for subsequent stages. In this book the life course is conceptualised as sequences of states and sequences of events. In each domain of life, a state and event sequence can be identified. A second challenge is embedding. The life course is embedded in a historical context, and the visualisation should reveal how developmental processes vary in time. That requires at least two time scales: age and calendar time. The Lexis diagram, named after the demographer Wilhelm Lexis (1837–1914), meets that challenge. Each line in a Lexis diagram represents the follow-up of a single individual from entry to exit on two time scales: age and calendar time. The Lexis diagram is widely used and has inspired improved visualisations of life histories. Some of that research is reviewed in the brief historical note in Sect. 5.1. A third challenge is to reveal significant information at a glance. The graph should convey essential information and highlight the unexpected.

This chapter focuses on the application of a corpus of specialized genres to the teaching of legal and business English for students of translation at a graduate level. It includes a number of practical learning activities aimed to improve their reading and writing skills, which proved to be the most relevant skills for the acquisition of Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) after analysing the needs of the students. The issues dealt with in these activities include collocations, lexis, macrostructure, suffixed prepositions and expressions of obligation, permission and prohibition. The multilingual corpus of specialized professional full-text documents we work with has been developed by the GENTT (Textual Genres for Translation) Research Group and provides teachers and learners of professional languages with text models and patterns to be used as conceptual, textual, linguistic and terminological reference. The GENTT corpus is a collaborative web 2.0 environment that enables teachers and students to search, feed, download and manage the documents contained in the corpus by means of a user-friendly online interface, making it an effective teaching-learning Internet tool in the area of LSP.

This article aims to show the inefficacy of implementing the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in a globalised world. It advances a criticism of the voluntary adoption of CSR by businesses. The incorporation of CSR preserves the image of businesses because consumers perceived them as ‘ethical traders’. However, the proliferation of outsourcing has facilitated the disregard of CSR whereby businesses are externalising their manufacturing tasks to Asia. This article explores the case of Doe v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (U.S. Dist LEXIS 98102, 2007) in the attempt to highlight the process of externalisation by which through outsourcing multinational corporations legitimately forget CSR principles.

The present chapter focuses on the analysis of students’ translations of literary texts (novels and short stories) from the point of view of the errors that they contain. The analysis is based on the collection of literary translations done by students of translation programmes at the University of Silesia. The first part of the article is devoted to a brief description of literary translation classes. The errors are then divided into two main classes: translation and linguistic ones (as described by Pym 1992; Kussmaul 1995; Kozlowska 2001). Both types are discussed at some length and plentiful examples, taken from students’ translations, are provided. Moreover, the errors are also described from the point of view of their frequency in students’ work. The second part of the article focuses on presenting short exercises, mostly connected with subtle differences between English and Polish in the area of lexis, which can safely be used during translation classes, e.g. as warm-up activities. It is hoped that exercises of this type will make students (more) aware of distinctions between English and Polish, and, consequently, the overall quality of their translations will be improved.