EVO 2008

There’s still some time left to register for a session at EVO 2008. The online workshops range from those for beginners to those for the more advanced. I hope to be able to qualify for one as well.

Filed under: Blogs & Wikis, CALL, Study, Teaching

Reading scinence

I’m reading this book and have just finished reading Lemke’s article on visual and verbal semiotics in scientific texts and Wignell’s article on technicality and abstraction in social science.

I found both of them very useful for my study of scientific abstracts. Texts do create a visual image and with experience we learn what the visual stands for (or in Hoey’s terms: we are primed to recognize the visual image of an abstract and its visual position in a page). Even when I first saw abstracts placed in the Contents of a journal, I immediately recognized them for what they were. I’ll take Lemke’s idea up and use it in my thesis.

I also appreciate how Wignell uses Halliday’s concepts of grammatical metaphor, abstraction and technicality to study the discourse of social sciences. I think his findings will help me explain the roles of generic abstraction in scientific abstracts.

All in all, this book has been a rewarding reading so far.

Filed under: Study

Language Change

I’m reading William Croft’s Explaining Language Change: An Evolutionary Approach. The parallels he draws between evolution in biology and evolution in linguistics seem quite fascinating, especially since I’m interested in some of the universal features of language change.

I’m interested in the evolution of scientific articles – how they changed in time. I’m using a corpus for the analysis. The findings of corpus studies in this field have covered various aspects of language change. However, the articles fail to deal with the larger picture most of the time. I’m not saying that the findings are not relevant. I just miss a kind of framework that would draw the pieces together. Perhaps there’s no such thing, perhaps I just don’t see it yet. Perhaps I will.

Filed under: Study