Patterns and Meanings consists of case studies which make use of corpora and concordance technology. Each case study elaborates a problem area, makes reference to both the descriptive and applied literature thus far, and then suggests ways of exploiting corpus data to shed light on the problem. Language phenomena investigated include word sense, phraseology and syntax, metaphor and creative use, text reference, idiom, and translation. Emphasis is given to information that usually cannot be found in dictionaries, grammars, language textbooks or other resources, but which the study of corpus data makes available. This work is particularly important not only for its language description insights, but also for pedagogical application. Further useful suggestions are included on setting up a medium-sized corpus on a personal computer.

Intensification plays a major role in spoken and written interaction, enabling the writer or speaker to express different levels of commitment. This book explores the patterns and meanings of intensifiers in Chinese learner English by ways of comparison with native English. The study is conducted within the theoretical framework of Firthian contextual theory of meaning, Sinclairian model of Extended Units of Meaning (EUM) and Hunston's pattern grammar. The method of contrastive inter-language analysis (CIA) is adopted and the intensifier collocations in learner English and native English are explored by means of quantitative and qualitative analyses of corpora data. This book is the first attempt to investigate the patterning and meaning features of intensifiers systematically with the corpora data in Chinese learner English. Readers will obtain a relatively complete picture of how Chinese learners use intensifiers to realize their attitudinal meanings.

This work is designed, firstly, to both provoke theoretical discussion and serve as a practical guide for researchers and students in the field of corpus linguistics and, secondly, to offer a wide-ranging introduction to corpus techniques for practitioners of discourse studies. It delves into a wide variety of language topics and areas including metaphor, irony, evaluation, (im)politeness, stylistics, language change and sociopolitical issues. Each chapter begins with an outline of an area, followed by case studies which attempt both to shed light on particular themes in this area and to demonstrate the methodologies which might be fruitfully employed to investigate them. The chapters conclude with suggestions on activities which the readers may wish to undertake themselves. An Appendix contains a list of currently available resources for corpus research which were used or mentioned in the book.

This Reader presents classic news studies representing several methodologies and approaches to guide students in their initial exploration into the topics.

This book presents a review and criticism of all sociological literature on suicide, from Emile Durkheim's influential Suicide (1897) to contemporary writings by sociologists who have patterned their own work on Durkheim's. Douglas points out fundamental weaknesses in the structural-functional study of suicide, and offers an alternative theoretical approach. He demonstrates the unreliability of official statistics on suicide and contends that Durkheim's explanations of suicide rates in terms of abstract social meanings are founded on an inadequate and misleading statistical base. The study of suicidal actions, Douglas argues, requires an examination of the individual's own construction of his actions. He analyzes revenge, escape, and sympathy motives; using diaries, notes, and observers' reports, he shows how the social meanings of actual cases should be studied. Originally published in 1967. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. After a ten-year silence, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure are now publishing a major statement in the form of three books which will, in their words, "lay the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will we hope replace existing ideas and practices entirely." The three books are The Timeless Way of Building, The Oregon Experiment, and this book, A Pattern Language. At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation of the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. At the core of the books, too, is the point that in designing their environments people always rely on certain "languages," which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a forma system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable a person to make a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. "Patterns," the units of this language, are answers to design problems (How high should a window sill be? How many stories should a building have? How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?). More than 250 of the patterns in this pattern language are given: each consists of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seemly likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today.

The studies presented in this book should be of interest to anybody concerned with the teaching of arithmetic to young children or with cognitive development in general. The 'eaching experiment· was carried out with half a dozen children entering first grade over two years in biweekly sessions. Methodologically the authors' research is original. It is a longitudinal but not a naturalistic study, since the experimenter-teachers directed their interaction with each individual child with a view to his or her possible progress. It is experimental in the sense that two groups of subjects were selected according to criteria derived from an earlier study (Steffe, von Glasersfeld, Richards & Cobb, 1983) and that the problems proposed were comparable, though far from identical across the subjects; but unlike more rigid and shorter "learning" or ''training" studies it does not include pre-and posttests, or predetermined procedures. Theoretically, the authors subscribe to Piagefs constructivism: numbers are made by children, not found (as they may find some pretty rocks, for example) or accepted from adults (as they may accept and use a toy). The authors interpret changes in the children's counting behaviors in terms of constructivist concepts such as assimilation, accommodation, and reflective abstraction, and certain excerpts from protocols provide on-line examples of such processes at work. They also subscribe to Vygotsky's proposal for teachers '0 utilize the zone of proximal development and to lead the child to what he (can) not yet do· (1965, p. 104).