Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, Humboldt-University of Berlin (Institut für Anglistik & Amerikanistik), course: SE Verb Semantics, language: English, abstract: LOLspeak has established itself as a remarkably distinct form of online English language. The dialect used in memes with LOLcats has developed from being a Netspeak offspring slang used "to make amusing text for funny cat pictures" to a language phenomenon with "regularities and patterns" that make it "a complex and systematic reimagining of the English language". It has transgressed its meme boundaries and manifested in commentary forums, the bible rewrite "LOLcat Bible Translation Project" – and has become the subject of a number of academic works. From a verb semantic point of view, LOLspeak jumps directly into the eye with its simplification and regularisation of verbs. The dialect in fact seems to be putting strong emphasis on the verb and its function amidst a sentence by shifting not only several grammatical components, but in this way also the aspect & situation type the verb and its correlating items in a sentence operate in. In doing so, it seems to be stressing the importance of the verb in this context as well as making aware of what in fact and in detail composes the aspect and situation type of a sentence. Is LOLspeak threfore a dialect of English that is worth appraising linguistically for its instructive & educational value – or is it a simple "language play" that rather bears the contrary effect and degenerates the English language with its shifting and breaking of linguistic rules?

With examples of conversation, this book is a lively account of social and intellectual import of everyday talk about language.

Language, Literacy, and Technology explores how technology matters to language and the ways we use it.

Every five years, on the occasion of the International Congress of Slavists, a volume appears that presents a comprehensive overview of current Slavic linguistic research in the Netherlands. Like its predecessors, the present collection covers a variety of topics: Bulgarian and Polish aspectology (Barentsen, Genis), Slavic historical linguistics (Kortlandt, Vermeer), pragmatics of tense usage in Old Russian (Dekker), dialect description (Houtzagers), L2 acquisition (Tribushinina & Mak), Russian foreigners’ speech imitation (Peeters & Arkema), corpus-based semantics (Fortuin & Davids) and theoretical work on negation (Keijsper, Van Helden). As can be seen from this list, the majority of the contributions in this peer-reviewed volume displays the data-oriented tradition of Dutch Slavic linguistics, but studies of a more theoretical nature are also represented.

This book offers a highly accessible introduction to natural language processing, the field that supports a variety of language technologies, from predictive text and email filtering to automatic summarization and translation. With it, you'll learn how to write Python programs that work with large collections of unstructured text. You'll access richly annotated datasets using a comprehensive range of linguistic data structures, and you'll understand the main algorithms for analyzing the content and structure of written communication. Packed with examples and exercises, Natural Language Processing with Python will help you: Extract information from unstructured text, either to guess the topic or identify "named entities" Analyze linguistic structure in text, including parsing and semantic analysis Access popular linguistic databases, including WordNet and treebanks Integrate techniques drawn from fields as diverse as linguistics and artificial intelligence This book will help you gain practical skills in natural language processing using the Python programming language and the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) open source library. If you're interested in developing web applications, analyzing multilingual news sources, or documenting endangered languages -- or if you're simply curious to have a programmer's perspective on how human language works -- you'll find Natural Language Processing with Python both fascinating and immensely useful.

This book examines the ways in which language functions, how it influences thought and how it varies according to age, ethnicity, class and gender. It seeks to answer such questions as: How can a language reflect the status of children and older people? Do men and women talk differently? How can our use of language mark our ethnic identity? It also looks at language use in politics and the media and investigates how language affects and constructs our identities, exploring notions of correctness and attitudes towards language use. While it can be used as a stand-alone text, this edition of Language, Society and Power has also been fully cross-referenced with the new companion title: The Language, Society and Power Reader. Together these books provide the complete resource for students of English language and linguistics, media, communication, cultural studies, sociology and psychology. --Book Jacket.

Our everyday lives are increasingly being lived through electronic media, which are changing our interactions and our communications in ways that we are only beginning to understand. In Discourse 2.0: Language and New Media, editors Deborah Tannen and Anna Marie Trester team up with top scholars in the field to shed light on the ways language is being used in, and shaped by, these new media contexts. Topics explored include: how Web 2.0 can be conceptualized and theorized; the role of English on the worldwide web; how use of social media such as Facebook and texting shape communication with family and friends; electronic discourse and assessment in educational and other settings; multimodality and the "participatory spectacle" in Web 2.0; asynchronicity and turn-taking; ways that we engage with technology including reading on-screen and on paper; and how all of these processes interplay with meaning-making. Students, professionals, and individuals will discover that Discourse 2.0 offers a rich source of insight into these new forms of discourse that are pervasive in our lives.