Linguistics

lexicography. He explains that there are “Usage Wars” which are silent wars fought in the introductory pages of dictionaries. Wallace states that these “Usage Wars” are debates over the use of the English language and continues to explain the two linguistic parties that are at bay: The Prescriptivists and Descriptivists. According to David Foster Wallace, the best…

In Saussure’s, Course in General Linguistics, he conceives of the linguistic sign as a psychological entity with a concept and a sound-image (Saussure, 66). He does this in order to avoid the fallacy of examining only the sound-image, or phonetic pronunciation of the word, for according to him, each recalls the other, and a concept without a sound-image is voiceless, and a sound-image without a concept is meaningless (Saussure, 67). The main crux of Saussure’s argument is that because “because…

Communication in advertising transpires through decoding and encoding levels of messages from the sender to the receiver via a particular medium. Advertisers use on-linguistic and linguistic cues designed to communicate a desired message towards a targeted audience in order to achieve their ultimate goal of selling their product. This essay examines the Katy Perry ‘Killer Queen’ perfume advertisement with a semiotic analysis approach. Furthermore, it analyses the conglomeration of connotations,…

those children quite fluent in their new language. In addition, school aged children can't get the new language as easy as the pre-children. They have to make an extra effort in order to understand the semantics, syntax and the rest of the linguistics branches. Beside they need to practice it among a community that forces them to use it such as schools. Participating in social practices using a second language makes children improve their way of expressing their ideas and emotions,…

Learning a second language is a complex process that exceeds the acquisition of its structure and vocabulary. One of the major components of mastering a new language requires learners to become familiar and sensitive to the preference in language use by native speakers of certain sequences of words over others (Wray, 2000). It is the mastery of these word sequences that distinguishes novice from proficient L2 learners. Yet, there is still little agreement across studies on the number of words…

Teaching codeswitching from African American Vernacular English (AAVE) to Standard English (SE) is a large topic in the linguistic and academic world. I have researched the benefits, usages, and learning’s of codeswitching from African American Vernacular English to Standard English in a classroom. Codeswitching is the use of more than one language or dialect in a single stretch of discourse, it may occur in two separate clauses, or when speakers switch dialects in the same clause. I have delved…

abilities. This position too has been criticized by various critics who point to the empirical studies which prove that the quality and amount of exposure to a language by a child affects his or her learning experience (Benson, 2010). Recent empirical studies by developmental psychologists point to the fact that language is exclusively human, biologically based in terms of capacity and the environment of a child influences the innate potential to learn. A number of empirical studies have found…

with people who are also interested in linguistics. I met individuals who come from different backgrounds, especially in the Linguistics Department. I shared my office with American, Japanese and German graduate students and it has been refreshing to discuss language and cultural issues. I have learned not to judge people on first impression as well as appreciate and respect different cultures. At Indiana State University I increased my knowledge in linguistics and second language acquisition…

The social significance of language has been claimed by Saussure (1916), the founder of modern linguistics that “speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other” (p. 8). He made distinction and named the grammatical system of language as langue, and the social use of language as parole. Firth (1937) also…

like Google Word2Vec and novel models like SVM and LSTM are used to study the contextual and linguistic dependencies and improve the classification results. The authors stress on the qualitative analysis of the results and try to explore the contextual dependency by adding various features to the training sets. This can be explained by the high precision, recall, and F1 scores obtained after adding linguistic characteristics and pre and post contextual features to the training set. Also, a major…