Loose, baggy sentences - Faulty connections - III-matched partners - Mismanaged numbers and references - Problems with punctuation - The parts of a sentence.

This book asserts that language is a signaling system rather than a code, based in part on such research as the finding that 5-year-old English and Dutch children use pronouns correctly in their own utterances, but often fail to interpret these forms correctly when used by someone else. Emphasizing the unique and sometimes competing demands of listener and speaker, the author examines resulting asymmetries between production and comprehension. The text offers examples of the interpretation of word order and pronouns by listeners, and word order freezing and referential choice by speakers. It is explored why the usual symmetry breaks down in children but also sometimes in adults. Gathering contemporary insights from theoretical linguistic research, psycholinguistic studies and computational modeling, Asymmetries between Language Production and Comprehension presents a unified explanation of this phenomenon. “Through a lucid, comprehensive review of acquisition studies on reference-related phenomena, Petra Hendriks builds a striking case for the pervasiveness of asymmetries in comprehension/production. In her view, listeners systematically misunderstand what they hear, and speakers systematically fail to prevent such misunderstandings. She argues that linguistic theory should take stock of current psycholinguistic and developmental evidence on optionality and ambiguity, and recognize language as a signaling system. The arguments are compelling yet controversial: grammar does not specify a one-to-one correspondence between form and meaning; and the demands of the mapping task differ for listeners and speakers. Her proposal is formalized within optimality theory, but researchers working outside this framework will still find it of great interest. In the language-as-code vs. language-as-signal debate, Hendriks puts the ball firmly in the other court.” Ana Pérez-Leroux, University of Toronto, Canada

​This volume brings together a group of philosophically oriented logicians and logic-minded philosophers, mainly from Asia, to address a variety of logical and philosophical topics, such as modal logic and related directions (e.g. temporal logic, epistemic logic, deontic logic, logic of conditionals, and modal proof theory), theory of truth, paradoxes, intentionality, and social networks. New approaches are also proposed, such as extended modal logic with planarity of graphs, extended branching time temporal logic with conditional operators, and a relational treatment of language and logical systems, to name but a few.Given the variety of topics and issues discussed here, the book will appeal to readers from a broad range of disciplines, from mathematical/philosophical logic, computing science, cognitive science and artificial intelligence, to linguistics, game theory and beyond.

The authors present a comprehensive overview of past research in ambiguity in the field of psycholinguistics. Experimental results have often been equivocal in allowing a choice between the single-reading hypothesis and the multiple-reading hypothesis of processing of ambiguous sentences. This text reviews the arguments and experimental results in support of each of these views, and further investigates the contributions of context and thematic constraints in the process of ambiguity resolution. Commentary is also made on the possible hierarchical ordering of difficulty in the treatment of ambiguity, as well as critically related considerations like bias, individual differences, general cognitive strategies for dealing with multiphase representations, and the inherent differences between lexical and syntactic ambiguity.

Structural Ambiguity in English is a major new scholarly work that provides an innovative and accessible linguistic description of those features of the language that can be exploited to generate structural ambiguities. Most ambiguity scholarship is concerned with disambiguation-the process of making what is ambiguous clear. This book takes the opposite approach as it focuses on describing the features in the English language that may contribute towards the creation of structural ambiguities, which form the core of some of the best word-plays found in advertising, comedy and marketing. Oaks utilizes a systematic and comprehensive inventory approach that identifies individual elements in the language and their distinctive behaviors that can be manipulated in the deliberate creation of structural ambiguities. In doing so he also provides authentic examples to illustrate the concepts he presents. This book will appeal to researchers and academics interested in the structure of the English language, usage, pragmatics, communication, natural language processing, editing, and humor studies as well as those in marketing, advertising, or humor writing.

By examining the acquisition of Spanish in combination with languages other than English (Arabic, Basque, Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, Farsi, French, German, Nahuatl, Quechua, Portuguese, Swedish, Turkish), this volume advances novel data pertinent to the field’s understanding of acquisition of Spanish in the XXI century. Its crosslinguistic nature invites us to reconsider major theoretical questions such as the role of L1 transfer, linguistic typology, and onset of acquisition from a fresh perspective, and to question the validity of the traditional parameter (re)setting perspective taken in SLA. Additionally, this volume underscores the necessity of providing accurate descriptions of the language pairings investigated, emphasizing the interconnection between linguistic and SLA theory, and pushing us to a more atomic view of the system in which features and feature bundles mapped onto lexical items comprise the skeleton of language. This volume is of great relevance for researchers and students of SLA alike.

Make sure you’re studying with the most up-to-date prep materials! Look for the newest edition of this title, The Princeton Review GMAT Premium Prep, 2023 (ISBN: 9780593450604, on-sale July 2022). Publisher's Note: Products purchased from third-party sellers are not guaranteed by the publisher for quality or authenticity, and may not include access to online tests or materials included with the original product.

It is clear that a proper understanding of what academic English is and how to use it is crucial for success in college, and yet students face multiple obstacles in acquiring this new 'code', not least that their professors often cannot agree among themselves on a definition and a set of rules. Understanding Language Use in the Classroom aims to bring the latest findings in linguistics research on academic English to educators from a range of disciplines, and to help them help their students learn and achieve. In this expanded edition of the original text, college educators will find PowerPoint presentations and instructor materials to enhance the topics covered in the text. Using these additional resources in the classroom will help educators to engage their students with this crucial, but frequently neglected, area of their college education; and to inform students about the unexamined linguistic assumptions we all hold, and that hold us back. You can find additional materials on the Resources tab of our website.