British Linguist Research Articles

Multidimensional Analysis of Differences in Lexico-Grammatical Patterns in Saudi and British Linguistics and English Language Teaching Research Articles

This study explores linguistic variation in research papers published by Saudi and British researchers in Linguistics and English language teaching (ELT). The main aim is to identify and compare interdisciplinary lexico-grammatical patterns between and within the sub-disciplines of these research articles, exploring the extent to which Saudi research articles align with or diverge from their British counterparts. Utilizing Biber’s (1988) multidimensional model, this research developed a specialized corpus of academic research articles, which was analyzed using multivariate statistical techniques to investigate linguistic variation. The corpus included tagging of 67 linguistic features, and factor analysis was employed to identify patterns of linguistic co-occurrence. Significant findings indicate that Saudi research papers distinctly differ from British papers in their preference for informational, explicit, non-argumentative, and abstract discourse. Notably, while most sections of the research papers showed variations in non-argumentative discourse, the ELT conclusion sections from both regions demonstrated a tendency towards mixed-purpose discourse. The significance of the study lies in its detailed analysis of how regional differences affect lexico-grammatical choices within academic writing, offering a deeper understanding of linguistic strategies in scholarly communication. The study concludes with recommendations for further research to explore underlying factors contributing to these differences and suggests the development of targeted academic writing aids to support researchers in achieving greater international coherence in their discourse. This could potentially enhance the clarity and impact of scholarly communication across diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

ARTIFICIAL LANGUAGE «NADSAT» IN THE RUSSIAN, FRENCH AND CHINESE LANGUAGES

This article is devoted to the analysis of the translation of the artificial language «nadsat» in the novel A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. A sci-fi novel written in 1962 and set in a near-dystopian future, A Clockwork Orange revolves around a violent youth subculture and, in particular, 15-year-old delinquent Alex and his friends. Based on the predilection of young people for the creation and use of informal words and slang, the author of the novel, British linguist and writer A. Burgess, uses fictitious vocabulary, i.e., the artificial language «nadsat». The relevance of the study is due to the fact that the problem of understanding and correct interpretation of words in fictional and artificial languages has not been sufficiently studied.
 The purpose of the study is to identify common features of the translation of the artificial language «nadsat» from English into Russian, French and Chinese.
 The research methods are method of theoretical analysis translation analysis of the text from the original language into Russian, French and Chinese.
 The results of the study showed that an adequate translation of «Nadsat» will help the reader understand the main idea expressed by the author of the novel.

A Stylistic Study of "The School" by Donald Barthelme

Unfolding meanings, aims, purposes, and other targets through the dissection of the language is possible but not trouble-free since the procedure needs an obvious awareness of the structure of the language and a deep insight into the text. This paper tries to analyze "The School", a short story by Donald Barthelme, stylistically by using the transitivity system, which is based on Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), to reach the meanings which lie behind the words. The transitivity system is devised by Michael Halliday (1925-2018 -the British linguist), which consists of several process types. This system can externalize the meanings of the text through its clauses. Thus, the task of the present paper, as it is stated formerly, is to analyze the clauses in the chosen text adapting Halliday's transitivity system to obtain meanings related to the nature of the story. And analyzing the clauses of Barthelme's story, the nature of the story and the meanings are revealed as the study's major findings.

The lexeme <i>chino</i> in Mexican Spanish

In accordance with the affirmation expressed by the British linguist David Crystal that «language is the primary index, or symbol, or register of identity», this article examines the meaning of the word chino in Mexico as «curly hair» which, unlike all Spanish-speaking countries, has a private and peculiar meaning to this nation, being the hallmark of its identity. Different sources, both lexicographical and theoretical, are analyzed regarding this meaning and it is concluded that this meaning has to do with the miscegenation that occurred in New Spain, particularly among Indian women with black men, who, according to different names of the castes, derived in the so-called «chino» due to the predominance of the black gene in the blood, which gave them the African physical characteristics, among which is, precisely, the curly hair, and, based on this distinctive feature, the meaning of «curly hair» became general and began to be used to name all people with curly hair without necessarily having African features, a designation that is still actively used among Mexicans.

Eavesdropping on the Emperor: Interrogators and Codebreakers in Britain's War with Japan by Peter Kornicki

Reviewed by: Eavesdropping on the Emperor: Interrogators and Codebreakers in Britain's War with Japan by Peter Kornicki Roger H. Brown (bio) Eavesdropping on the Emperor: Interrogators and Codebreakers in Britain's War with Japan . By Peter Kornicki. Oxford University Press, 2021. xxx, 402 pages. $29.95. For decades after World War II, the extent of Allied success in breaking enemy codes and the contribution it made toward the defeat of the Axis powers remained classified. The gradual lifting of the veils of secrecy finally opened the archives to scholars and permitted participants to share their experiences. Regarding the Asia-Pacific theater of the war, the lion's share of attention went to codebreaking in relation to battles such as Pearl Harbor and Midway and to strategic decisions such as those regarding war termination. More recently, historians have produced a small but solid body of scholarship examining the intensive Japanese language programs required to exploit such cryptological successes, as well as to translate documents recovered on the battlefield and interrogate prisoners. However, reflecting the dominant role of the United States in the Pacific theater, the scholarship on wartime linguists has almost totally neglected the British contribution. 1 In Eavesdropping on the Emperor, Peter Kornicki endeavors to redress this deficiency and to thereby "reveal what made the Japanese-language training programmes during the war so successful, who the remarkable teachers and their extraordinary students were, and what unseen contributions they made to the war effort in all theatres of war" (p. xxviii). Kornicki's successful effort echoes the achievements of the men and women whose stories he tells. Indeed, recovering the personal experiences of British linguists, which is at the heart of Kornicki's account, constitutes one of the great strengths of his book. The reader meets an almost endless variety of people appearing and often reappearing throughout the book, and the details regarding these individuals and their experiences in various services, programs, and theaters of action should prove valuable to a wide array of researchers. Kornicki begins by demonstrating how, even as the likelihood of war with Japan loomed, British diplomatic and military leaders responded with [End Page 267] astonishing complacency to entreaties from knowledgeable academics and military officers about the dire need for Japanese linguists. He partly attributes this lack of action to the overall underestimation of the military threat posed by Japan, a prejudice that was only shattered by the successful Japanese operations during the first six months of the war. In response to these setbacks, the few academics, missionaries, military officers, and other individuals with close knowledge of Japan and its language then established language programs at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and the Bedford School. The instructors and students came from eclectic backgrounds ranging from professors at elite universities to working-class youths and enlisted servicemen. Together they confronted the daunting challenge of attaining a high level of proficiency in a difficult language in an extraordinarily short period of time. Success required not just personal ability but powerful motivation. Inspiration could come from many sources, but those already in service sometimes bore their own special incentives. Peter Laslett, who joined Fleet Air Arm in 1940 and was sent to learn Japanese in 1942, recalled that: "They … told us that if we couldn't read Japanese within a year we would be sent back to our ships. I had been on the Murmansk route, which was extremely dangerous, so I learned Japanese under sentence of being drowned" (p. 82). Kornicki details how these diverse students, once enrolled, engaged in truly intense study directed at mastering those aspects of the Japanese language required for their expected tasks, which included translation of decoded diplomatic messages, tactical wireless intercepts, diaries and orders found on the battlefield, and interrogation of prisoners. Graduates deployed to duty posts scattered as far as Singapore, Mauritius, India, Australia, Burma, and, eventually, occupied Japan. As was the case with their U.S. counterparts, most of these men and women returned to their civilian lives and never made use of their language skills again, but some went on to lay the foundations for the great postwar expansion of Anglophone Japanese studies. The tardiness of...

Anthropology and linguistics in Great Britain: Bronislaw Malinowski and John Rupert Firth

This paper examines how Bronislaw Malinowski, a Polish anthropologist most of whose career was in London, took inspiration from the British linguist Henry Sweet and in turn provided insights of great importance to the principal figure of the London School, J. R. Firth. Firth took Malinowski's concept of the ‘context of situation’ as the basis of his own contextual theory of meaning. Its fundamental insights arose from Malinowski’s research on difficult-to-access languages which foreshadowed later ‘pragmatics’, and which Malinowski then proposed were applicable as well to English and other European languages. Convinced of the complementarity of disciplines such as ethnology and philology, the anthropologist Malinowski questioned basic assumptions of the linguistics of the inter-war period. Firth’s frequent acknowledgments of Malinowski’s original insights are accompanied by efforts to spell out the differences between them.

‘That is very important, isn’t it?’

Abstract This study explores the use of content-oriented questions in British and Montenegrin university lectures. It examines their formal realisation, their frequency and their contextual functions, as well as the differences and similarities related to these questions between British linguistics lectures taken from the standard British corpora, and a specially compiled corpus of Montenegrin linguistics lectures. Compared to previous studies on content-oriented questions, one modified and five new functions are revealed, alongside one new formal realisation. The main differences between the corpora include the greater frequency of content-oriented questions in the Montenegrin lectures and a new questioning realisation, found only in the Montenegrin corpus, which is potentially attributable to differences between academic cultures. The major similarities relate to the use of the four most common question forms, which perform the same contextual functions. This contrastive study thus provides insights into the additional communicative functions and forms of content-oriented questions in university lectures.

Geoffrey Leech’in Anlamlandırmanın Yedi Türü Işığında Uluslararası Af Örgütü’nün İşkence Karşıtı Kampanyaları

İnsan Hakları Bildirgesi uyarınca, dünya genelinde işkence, insan hakları ihlali olarak değerlendirilmektedir. Pek çok ülke, işkenceyi suç olarak kabul etmekte ve çeşitli cezai yaptırımlarla işkencenin önüne geçmeyi amaçlamaktadır. Bunun yanında Uluslararası Af Örgütü (Amnesty International, AI) gerçekleştirdiği kampanyalardaki kamu spotları üzerinden işkenceye karşı çeşitli mesajlar vererek, uluslararası kamuoyunda işkenceye karşı farkındalık oluşturmaya çalışmaktadır. Çalışmada AI’nin çeşitli ülkelerde gerçekleştirdiği işkence karşıtı kampanyalarda işkencenin engellenmesine yönelik vermek istediği mesajları incelenmiştir. Bu amaçla çalışmada AI’nin işkence karşıtı kampanyalarda kullandığı kamu spotları, İngiliz dilbilimci Geoffrey Leech’in Anlamlandırmanın Yedi Türü (kavramsal, yan, toplumsal, duygusal, yansıtıcı, eşdizimsel ve konusal anlam) üzerinden göstergebilimsel açıdan analiz edilmiştir. Çalışma kapsamında elde edilen bulgular ışığında işkence karşıtı kampanyalardaki kamu spotlarında yer alan görsel ve yazılı göstergeler üzerinden insanların aktif olarak işkence karşıtı mücadeleye dâhil olmasıyla işkencenin önlenebileceğine yönelik mesajların verildiği ortaya çıkarılmıştır. Bu şekilde AI’nin gerçekleştirdiği kampanyalar üzerinden uluslararası kamuoyunda işkence karşıtı aktivistlerin sayısının arttırılmaya çalışıldığı sonucuna ulaşılmıştır.

A Study of Junior Students English Writing Based on Error Analysis Theory

Writing is a concrete expression of the ability to pragmatic, as well as an important skill in learning English. In English Curriculum Standard for Compulsory Education (2022), students are expected to be able to use different sentence structures and tenses in their written expressions to describe or introduce people, things or events around them, expressing emotional attitudes, opinions and intentions. In addition, errors in writing can reflect students’ knowledge of pragmatic. The British linguist Pit Corder proposed Error Analysis Theory in the late 1960s and pointed out that errors can be used as a learning tool. Integrating Error Analysis Theory with junior high school students’ writing can help improving their writing skills. Zizhong Falun Junior High School is located in Falun town, Zizhong county, Sichuan Province, which is a rural junior high school. In this study, the writer collected and analyzed the writing samples of students in the midterm examination of grade two in this school, as well as put forward the targeted suggestions.

Women in the Eighteenth-Century British linguistics: H. L. Thrale Piozzi and Her Dictionary of Synonyms of the English Language

Women in the Eighteenth-Century British linguistics: H. L. Thrale Piozzi and Her Dictionary of Synonyms of the English Language

How does the Spatial Plane Shade into the Psychological Plane in Alice Munro’s Short Story “Train”? An Analysis of Point of View in Fiction from a Different Point of View

Boris Uspensky, in his A Poetics of Composition (1973), offered a model for the study of point of view in fiction. His model was later revised and refined by British linguist Roger Fowler in his Linguistic Criticism (1986). The Fowler-Uspensky model encompasses four planes: the ideological plane, the temporal plane, the spatial plane, and the psychological plane. In his Stylistics, Paul Simpson also avers that most writers prefer to construct a spatial perspective that shifts “almost seamlessly into the cognitive field of a character.” (2004: 80) One conspicuous example of this last case is a short story called “Train” written by Canadian writer Alice Munro. Thus, by using various stylistic tools such as deixis, techniques of speech and thought presentation, and transitivity, the overarching aim of this study is to analyze how the point of view on the spatial plane jells into the psychological plane in “Train”.

Основная проблематика кельтских исследований в современном британском языкознании

The aim of this work is to characterize the main problems of modern scientific research in celtology in the UK. The scientific originality of the article lies in a comprehensive analysis of the methodology of scientific works and the results obtained by the modern British linguists dealing with the Celtic linguistic problems. As a result, it is proved that Celtic studies at the present stage remain significant for science: they are devoted to the problems of field research, grammar, etymology, and have a great potential for further research among foreign and domestic philologists. In the conclusion of the article, the prospects for subsequent scientific research are outlined.

TEXT-WORLDS IN MICHAEL SWAN’S POETRY: A READER’S PERSPECTIVE

The article highlights the role of world-building elements in the process of readers’ interpretation of poetic texts. According to Text World Theory (P. Werth, J. Gavins), elements that set temporal and spatial boundaries, specify objects and entities; elements that describe their qualities; and those that desceibe events, actions or states enable readers to construct their own text-worlds – mental representations of the discourse. This principle underpins our analysis of free verse poetry of Michael Swan, a contemporary British linguist and poet. His texts abound in references to objects, entities, spatial and temporal relationships in the world around us; often, they dominate in the verbal context of a poem. Such references are a characteristic feature of both narrative and metaphor-based poetry. World-building elements are perceived as especially foregrounded in the poems where no conclusion or attitude are explititly stated. There are the following types of world-builders in Michael Swan’s poems: units that denote God as the supreme being, persons, animals and birds, geographic objects, material objects, objects and phenomena in the world of nature, scientific objects and notions, phenomena of human spiritual life, temporal and spatial parameters. We also consider their attributes. Taken together, they illustrate Michael Swan’s general themes – the nature of reality and being, the conception of God, human beings in social and historical contexts, human psychology, human relationships with nature, art. Besides, Swan’s mimetic reflection of reality has a significant emotionl potential. A mini-experiment within the framework of this research shows that it is necessary to further develop students’ skills in inferential interpretation of poetry.

Интерпретация феномена вежливости в трудах британского лингвиста Джеффри Лича

The purpose of the study is to identify the basic and additional aspects of the concept of politeness developed by Geoffrey Leech. Novelty of the study lies in conducting a comprehensive analysis of the British linguist’s views on the phenomenon of politeness. The obtained results have shown that the basic aspects of the considered concept include the principle of politeness, the notion of “speech events” and the notion of “communicative altruism”, while additional aspects include the idea of relationship between the principle of politeness and the principle of cooperation, the principle of irony, textual and interpersonal rhetoric, absolute and relative politeness and the maxims of speech communication.

Stylistic variation of prosodic patterns of a linguistic persona

This paper aims to study phonostylistic variation of prosodic characteristics of a linguistic persona. The new aspect brought to the field is the focus not only on pitch and speech rate but also on voice quality prosodic aspects of a linguistic persona. The subject was a world-famous British linguist David Crystal whose recordings of lecture and interview were used as the material for this study. The data suggest wide variability of practically every prosodic feature. Among them, pitch minimum, pitch range, loudness median and shimmer values proved to be most constant features of the linguistic persona. The other prosodic values underwent changes due to the shift from the modal voice in the interview to a more arduous voice in the lecture thus reflecting different pragmatics goals of commuication. Prosodic variation range of the linguistic persona in question turned out wider than the average one.

Meaning and Grammar in the light of Corpus Pattern Analysis

Abstract This article presents an interview with Professor Patrick Hanks, a British lexicographer and corpus linguist, who proposes a new approach – a corpus-driven, phraseological approach – to lexicography. Hanks has developed a procedure called Corpus Pattern Analysis (CPA), which is the foundation of The Pattern Dictionary of English Verbs (in progress). The basic aim of CPA is to explore the relationship between word meaning and patterns of word use. Hanks maintains that the verb is ‘the pivot of the clause’. Verb meanings – or, rather, the meanings of clauses – are mapped onto phraseological patterns, rather than just being listed for words in isolation. Associated with this is the Theory of Norms and Exploitations (TNE), which was discussed in his monograph published by MIT Press in 2013. In this interview, Professor Hanks outlines his vision of a phraseological dictionary of the future (an alternative to WordNet). He discusses meaning and grammar in the light of Corpus Pattern Analysis. Specifically, he explains the procedure of Corpus Pattern Analysis, and the objectives of the Pattern Dictionary of English Verbs (PDEV), including the light that such work can shed on the relationship between language and logic. He discusses the relationship between PDEV and English grammar, his evaluation of generative linguistics, and his views on Noam Chomsky. He also highlights the contributions made by linguists of the past to the understanding of the nature of meaning in language. He goes on to suggest that any new bilingual dictionary with Chinese as a source language should be based on careful analyses of actual language use, both in Chinese and in the various target languages.

Było, (nie) minęło. Przypomnienie tekstu Tony’ego McEnery’ego i Nicka Ostlera A New Agenda for Corpus Linguistics – Working with All of the World’s Languages

In this text I refererate and comment the work from two decades ago. I recall an article important for corpus linguistics – the work of Tony McEnery and Nick Ostler from 2000. In their paper they argue that corpus linguistics needs to expand to cover a wider set of languages. The challenge of building a multilingual corps is admittedly current. The development of corpus linguistics still depends on technical capabilities, but today we see significant changes in this field. In the article I not only present the reflections of British linguists, but I also show current and outdated problems.

THE J.R.R. TOLKIEN’S MYTH IN THE COUNTERCULTURE OUTLOOKS IN THE WEST SOCIETY OF 1960-1970S YEARS

The article is devoted to the researching of the J.R.R. Tolkien’s (British writer and linguist) influence on the outlook of counterculture movements in 1960-1970s years. The west countries’ history of that period describes a developing of the youth protest activity and the promoting of the trilogy «The Lords of the Rings», which became the most important embodiment of J.R.R. Tolkien’s mythology. As the result, the creativity of British writer became as the fantastic allusion to the modern and recent historical problems of society, such as the USA campaign in Vietnam, world wars, consumption cult, the harm to the environment, the fight for civil rights, etc. The purpose of that article is to identify the role of J.R.R. Tolkien’s myth in the ideological forming of youth movements of the mentioned time period in the USA and West Europe of 1960-1970s years. Through the prism of that interaction authors reconstruct a layer of counterculture mythology with the merging of Tolkinism’s (the writer’s creativity and outlook) and protest ideas inside the original awareness. The result of this process is in the appearance of the new youth movements’ ideological aspects, reflected in slogans, sings and street art of the pointed time period. The embodiment of the young generation’s protest activity with fictional heroes and events in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth has the main role in such aspects. However, today there is lack of the researching of that problem. Authors of the article suggest to look at the counterculture’s history in west countries through the prism of the pointed synthesis as the one of basically elements in the formation of modern mass culture and subculture layer.

Las nociones de <i>texto</i> y <i>contexto</i> en la Lingüística Sistémico-Funcional (LSF): aplicaciones, críticas y desarrollos en América Latina

La Lingüística Sistémico-Funcional (LSF) es una corriente neo-firthiana surgida en Gran Bretaña bajo el liderazgo intelectual de Michael Halliday. En este artículo planteamos que, para poder comprender las aplicaciones, las críticas y los desarrollos de la LSF, es importante revisar sus orígenes y su relación con otras perspectivas neo-firthianas que han contribuido a fortalecer la lingüística británica. Nos enfocamos en las nociones de texto y contexto como fueron concebidas originalmente en el modelo clásico (Halliday, 1978; Halliday & Hasan, 1989) y luego aplicadas por otros investigadores, especialmente en Australia, quienes ampliaron la teoría (Martin, 1984, 1992; Martin & Rose, 2003, 2008; Martin & White, 2005). El objetivo es examinar la teoría a la luz de las nociones de contexto de situación y contexto de cultura de Halliday y su relación con las teorías de registro y género. Se evalúa el impacto de la lingüística británica con atención en las aplicaciones, críticas y desarrollos en América Latina, especialmente en los campos de la educación y el análisis crítico del discurso.

Translanguaging: the concept origin and meaning

The status of English language as a lingua franca and the steady expansion of its influence in many areas of human activity cause an ambiguous reaction in the modern world and is accompanied by the emergence of relevant trends in linguistic science and real practice of foreign languages training. In the world linguodidactics, there is a constant search for effective ways of teaching foreign languages, which is inevitably accompanied by a search for solutions to acute problems associated with the English language diversification from the one hand and the preservation of linguistic diversity and cultural identity from the other hand. Analysing the scholars and educators works the author traces the emergence and meaning of the concepts of “translingualism” as a linguistic approach and “translanguaging” as a didactic method. The paper is of great interest from the point of view of acquiring new knowledge and expanding the existing linguodidactic experience. In foreign linguistics, there is a lively discussion about the essence of this phenomenon, which arose as a pedagogical tool in the UK and later took shape in the pedagogical system by the efforts of many scientists and received full theoretical justification in the works written by American scientist Ophelia Garcia and British linguist Lee Wei. Translingualism is considered not only as a powerful pedagogical tool of foreign language training, one the ways to diversify and develop English language, but also as a way to solve accumulated problems in the social sphere, including those the speakers from different linguistic cultures have while communicating.