Submitted by Renata Lopes (renatasil82@gmail.com) on 2015-12-10T13:49:30Z No. of bitstreams: 1 luiscarlosdeoliveira.pdf: 2891819 bytes, checksum: 0fe2b07ce9d93e6c73dc0d884bec81b4 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Adriana Oliveira (adriana.oliveira@ufjf.edu.br) on 2015-12-10T14:13:47Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 luiscarlosdeoliveira.pdf: 2891819 bytes, checksum: 0fe2b07ce9d93e6c73dc0d884bec81b4 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-12-10T14:13:47Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 luiscarlosdeoliveira.pdf: 2891819 bytes, checksum: 0fe2b07ce9d93e6c73dc0d884bec81b4 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-04-15 / Esta pesquisa procura demonstrar como a Sociolinguística e seus pressupostos podem ampliar a competência comunicativa de alunos falantes da variedade urbana comum (FARACO, 2008) que estão em processo de compreensão e de domínio da língua que usam. Um dos objetivos é levá-los a pensar o uso da língua segundo os mais diversificados contextos sociais e interacionais. Por isso, desfazer (pré)conceitos que emergem de práticas tradicionais e promover um ensino que relaciona a diversidade linguística como fruto da diversidade social também constitui o objetivo deste estudo. Sobre isso, é essencial que toda a escola favoreça a reflexão sobre a língua materna, pensamento compartilhado por Bagno (2007, p.116) ao revelar que: “É precisamente em torno disso que devemos lutar para criar uma pedagogia da variação e da mudança linguística, uma reeducação sociolinguística, em que a língua seja vista como heterogênea, variável, mutante, sujeita às vicissitudes e peripécias da vida em sociedade.”. Com a finalidade de tornar tais discussões mais satisfatórias à realidade da sala de aula, a investigação aqui descrita é ancorada em um trabalho de pesquisa-ação realizado em uma turma de nono ano de uma escola particular do muncípio de Juiz de Fora (MG). Fundamentado, portanto, na metodologia da pesquisa-ação de base etnográfica, objetiva-se desenvolver uma pedagogia da variação linguística (FARACO, 2008), por meio da Sociolinguística Educacional (BORTONI-RICARDO, 2004). Verificou-se que, a partir dessa proposta, a educação sociolinguística e os pressupostos que a sustentam podem contribuir satisfatoriamente para ampliar a competência comunicativa de alunos em processo de compreensão e de domínio da língua materna. / In this research, I intend to demonstrate how Sociolinguistics and its assumptions are able to extend the communicative competence of students speaking of the common urban variety (FARACO, 2008) who are in process of understanding and acquisition of the language they use. One goal is to get them to think about the use of language according to the most diverse social and interactional contexts. Therefore, undo prejudices that emerge from traditional practices and promote education which connects linguistic diversity as a result of social diversity is also the aim of this study. Thus, it is essential that the whole school encourages reflection on the mother tongue, thought shared by Bagno (2007, p.116) by revealing that: "It is precisely around that we should strive to create a pedagogy of linguistics variation and change, sociolinguistics rehabilitation, where the language is seen as heterogeneous, variable, mutant, subject to the vicissitudes and incidents of social life. ". In order to make such discussions more satisfactory to the reality of the classroom, the research described here is anchored in an action research work carried out in a class of ninth year of a private school in Juiz de Fora (MG). Basing on the methodology of ethnographic action research, I aimed to develop a pedagogy of language variation (FARACO, 2008), through Educational Sociolinguistics (Bortoni-RICARDO, 2004). I found that, from this proposal, the sociolinguistic education and the assumptions which support it can satisfactorily contribute to enlarge the communicative competence of students in the process of understanding and acquisition of the mother tongue.

This essay is a corpus-based and quantitative study on language change that has occurred during global events, such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Global events especially affect the English language since it is a global language. In this essay, language change, collocation patterns and semantic prosody are discussed to compare the use of language and investigate whether any changes have occurred during the pandemic. These factors are studied since changes in collocation patterns can give words new meaning and possibly also a new semantic prosody. The collocations that are two or more words that often go together and the frequency of 10 sets of words are studied in particular, since they are often used during the Covid-19 pandemic. The British national corpus (BNC) and the Coronavirus Corpus (CVC) are used in the study to retrieve information on collocational patterns. By using the two corpora, it is possible to investigate the collocations during the pandemic by using CVC, and BNC for a comparison to the collocational use before the pandemic. This is done by using the collocate function in the corpora and investigating the collocates of two words on either side of the node. The major findings from the research reported in this essay show that many of the words have received additional meaning during the pandemic through their collocations, and they are most commonly neutral in semantic prosody.

The present thesis deals with the frequency and ways of using gender-specific and gender- neutral occupational labels and attempts to show if there is a tendency towards a more balanced representation of men and women in the contemporary spoken British English. The theoretical part describes the approaches to the study of language from the perspective of gender and summarises the previous research in the area of gender linguistics, focusing on the representation of men and women through language, linguistic androcentrism and sexism, language reforms proposed within the framework of equality movements and the impact of these reforms. The empirical part examines the frequencies and ways of using occupational -man compounds and compares them to their female and gender-neutral alternatives in the British parliamentary speeches, using the data from the Hansard corpus. The compounds with -man can be viewed as problematic since, from a feminist viewpoint, they contribute to linguistic invisibility of women, therefore efforts have been made to eliminate their usage. This thesis shows that overall the occupational -man forms tend to prevail over -woman, -person and other alternatives in the British parliamentary debates. However, it appears that with some occupations gender-neutral forms are becoming...

The present MA thesis studies adjectives of positive evaluation in present-day spoken British English. Other means of expressing subjective stance (e.g. intensifiers) were repeatedly described as undergoing constant change. However, variation in evaluative adjectives has received little quantitative attention so far (perhaps with the exception of Tagliamonte & Pabst, 2020). Our material consists of two corpora of informal spoken British English: Spoken BNC2014 and the spoken, demographically sampled section of the original BNC (1994). The starting point for the analysis is a frequency list of adjectives, from which we select adjectives with evaluative potential which differ significantly in frequency across the two corpora. Three adjectives: amazing, awesome and cool, are described in greater detail. The use of evaluative adjectives is described from several perspectives. We focus on syntactic functions of the adjectives, their co-occurrence with intensifiers and their collocations. From a sociolinguistic point of view, we describe the use of the adjectives with respect to the age and gender of the speakers. The analysis showed that adjectives of positive evaluation are an unstable category, and the change in adjectival use was reflected in its distribution. At the same time, we note changes in...

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The linguistic situation on the Korean peninsula is one ripe for research. For the past 70 years the two halves of the peninsula have been isolated from one another, thus creating two very different environments for development and change within the Korean language. It is hypothesized that due to conflict, divide, and social turmoil on the peninsula, the Korean language will have undergone a period of change in the last 70 years. This particular investigation looks at North and South Korean monophthong systems for evidence of a phonological shift. Studies of North Korea's language planning (Yong, 2001; Kumatani, 1990) will be incorporated to provide a background for lexical change in the country, which may also have contributed to phonological change. This study was carried out with the expectation that, due to the turmoil following the Korean War, both standard dialects would display some signs of phonetic shift.In order to track the changes to the monophthong systems over the last 70 years, a total of 7156 samples of the Korean language's eight monophthongs were collected from both North and South Korean films from the 1950s, 1980s, and 2010s. The vowels' F1 and F2 formants were measured using the computer program Praat. The data was then separated by vowel and run through statistical analyses. The results of a mixed methods ANOVA determined which vowels had shown significant variance between decades; the estimated means were then determined for each formant. Based on the statistical analysis, the North Korean vowels /a/, /Λ/, and /u/ have shifted significantly since the 1950s, while the rest of the North Korean monophthong system has not changed significantly. Most of the shifting occurred in the period after the 1980s. In the South, all vowels have shown significant variance for the variable of decade in F1, F2, or both formants. South Korea's results also indicate separate shifts between the 1950s and 1980s, and between the 1980s and 2010s. If the results of this study could be successfully replicated with the languages of other countries thrown into post-WWII turmoil, this study could prove that WWII left a lasting effect on the languages of the world as well. Even if there are not far-reaching implications, the study still demonstrates strong evidence that linguistic change has occurred in both the northern and southern halves of the Korean peninsula since it was split into two separate countries.

Writers, editors, and everyday language users look to dictionaries, style guides, usage guides, and other published works to help inform their language decisions. They want to know what is Standard English and what is not. Commentators have been prescribing and proscribing certain usages for centuries; however, their advice has traditionally been based on the subjective opinions of the authors. Recent works have analyzed usage by relying wholly or partly on statistical and descriptive data rather than traditional opinion alone; however, no work has presented statistical usage data in a user-friendly and consistent format. This study presents a statistically based methodology for analyzing the standardness of disputed English usage points that can be presented in a dictionary-like format useful to writers and editors. Using data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, this study determined the percent of use of several disputed usage items. Percents of use were then applied to a statistically based "standardness" scale with several levels. The scale presented in this study is adapted from scales that have been used previously to study language change. In addition, returns from the Corpus of Historical American English were used to present historical trends, if any, for each usage item. It was found that traditional sentiments about certain prescribed and proscribed usage items differ markedly from actual observed usage. Corpus data make it clear that even usage guides that purport to rely at least partly on descriptive data are often wrong about the prevalence and acceptability of usage items. To produce truly objective and accurate analysis, usage advice must depend on corpus data and use a standard usage-trend scale that accounts for how language changes.

Dictionaries and, to a lesser extent, usage guides provide writers, editors, and users of American English information on how to use the language appropriately. Dictionaries, in particular, hold authority over correct usage of words. However, historically, usage guides and dictionaries were created using the knowledge of a small group of people. Lexicographers like Noah Webster set out to prescribe a proper way of using American English. To make these judgments, they often relied on a combination of study and idiosyncratic intuitions. A similar process took place in creating usage guides. Though these manuals profess to explain how the language is used by American English speakers-or rather by the selected group of speakers deemed "standard" by usage guide editors and lexicographers-ultimately the manuals can only express the perspectives of the editors and lexicographers on this language. Historically, the views of these editors and lexicographers were the best tools available to assess language, but now computer-based corpora allow for studying larger swaths of language usage. This study examines how much dictionaries and usage guides agree with real-world usage found in corpus data. Using the Corpus of Historical American English, a set of dictionaries and usage guides published throughout the last two hundred years were analyzed to see how much agreement they had with corpus data in noting the addition of denominal verbs (i.e., verbs formed by the conversion of nouns as in 'They taped together the box.') in American English usage. It was found that the majority of the time dictionaries noted new denominal verbs before corpus data reflected accepted usage of these verbs. However, about a quarter of the time dictionaries noted new denominal verbs concurrently with the corpus data. These results suggest that dictionaries-and the subjective opinions of the lexicographers that created them-are more aligned with real-world usage than would be expected. Because of sparse listings, results for usage guide agreement was inconclusive.

In order for communication to take place, there must be a set of core concepts that are universal to all speakers. Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) has proposed an inventory of these concepts, called semantic primes, and uses them as universal concepts in the explication and exploration of cultural values. The English semantic primes, while the majority are Anglo-Saxon, contain words that have been borrowed from Latin, Old Norse, and French. Borrowing lexical items into core vocabulary has many implications. First, the primes are not entirely stable or immune to foreign influence, even the Anglo-Saxon primes have been susceptible to the processes of language change. Second, the primes do not reflect the trends of borrowing in English as a whole. And finally, because the primes are core vocabulary, this study opens up a new aspect of English as a mixed language.

This dissertation identifies and addresses key issues in Septuagint lexicography using case studies from the Greek version of Judges. The first chapter outlines the state of the question on the textual history of Judges in Hebrew and Greek, and also presents my lexicographical method and related matters. Chapter two surveys the history of Septuagint lexicography. I demonstrate how data about the meaning of Septuagint vocabulary has been insufficiently or in appropriately derived, expressed, and/or documented. I also highlight debates over the nature of post-classical Greek and the language of the Septuagint, which has predisposed scholars against viewing the Septuagint corpus as part of post-classical Greek in general. By pointing out methodological flaws that have plagued Septuagint lexicography-as well as theoretical problems in a Hebrew-priority view of the language-I argue for a Greek-priority view that evaluates Septuagint vocabulary in light of contemporary sources and emphasizes the importance of documentary evidence. The following chapters provide case studies from Greek Judges that demonstrate the benefits of a Greek-priority view. Many cases of consistent vocabulary disagreement in the textual history of the book cannot be explained on the basis of the Hebrew text nor given the data available in current lexicons. Examination of post-classical Greek evidence demonstrates that the motivation for the language change is multifaceted, but clearly includes matters of style and semantics in Greek independent from the source text. Chapter three focuses on παρατάσσω and παράταξις; chapter four on παιδάριον, παιδίον, νεανίας, and νεάνισκος; and chapter five on ἀπάντησις and συνάντησις. Each chapter concludes by discussing the relevance of the evidence for Septuagint lexicography, the motivation underlying the revision of Greek Judges, and the potential of Septuagint vocabulary to inform Greek lexicography in general. Chapter six summarizes my lexical analysis and discusses the benefits of a Greek-priority approach and its value for Septuagint lexicography. I posit a time-frame for the translation and revision of Greek Judges based on linguistic evidence. I conclude by emphasizing the need for renewed efforts in Septuagint lexicography to incorporate literary and nonliterary post-classical Greek sources. To address this need, I provide several sample lexicon entries for words discussed in the preceding study.