<b>Handbook of pragmatics</b> . 2002 installment. Compiled by Jef Verschueren, Jan-Ala Östman, Jan Blommaert, and Chris Bulcaen. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp. vi, 402. ISBN 1588114104. $150 (Hb).
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Language in the twenty-first century: Selected papers of the millennial conferences of the Center for Research and Documentation on World Language Problems, held at the University of Hartford and Yale University ed. by Humphrey Tonkin and Timothy Reagan Janne Skaffari Language in the twenty-first century: Selected papers of the millennial conferences of the Center for Research and Documentation on World Language Problems, held at the University of Hartford and Yale University. Ed. by Humphrey Tonkin and Timothy Reagan. (Studies in world language problems 1.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp. 209. ISBN 1588113841. $59.95. Approximately half of the languages of the world are endangered, while the role of one language is growing more and more dominant. This volume highlights questions of linguistic diversity, English as a world language, foreign language teaching, and the linguistic consequences of globalization. Between the editors’ introduction and the conclusion by Kurt E. Müller, the book contains eleven papers (eight to twenty pages each), regrouped below. The shared bibliography has about four hundred entries. Several contributors acknowledge the possible roles of linguists in maintaining linguistic diversity, from the merely scholarly to the political (see the Ken Hale-Peter Ladefoged debate, Language 68, 1992). The description/advocacy dilemma is prominent in ‘The “business” of language endangerment: Saving languages or helping people keep them alive?’ by Luisa Maffi, who proposes an active but ethical role for researchers. Another recurring concern is the role of English in the world. In ‘Global English and the non-native speaker: Overcoming disadvantage’ Ulrich Ammon discusses the problems of nonnative speakers of English and suggests developing a nonlocalized, multinational variety of English to improve their status. In ‘Contexts and trends for English as a global language’, Paul Bruthiaux examines the possible future competitors of English, noting that Chinese especially may have considerable potential. Some of the papers explore language issues in selected geographical contexts: ‘Development of national languages and management of English in East and Southeast Asia’ by Björn H. Jernudd, ‘Equality, maintenance, globalization: Lessons from Canada’ by Jacques Maurais, and ‘Maintaining linguodiversity: Africa in the twenty-first century’ by Alamin M. Mazrui. In ‘Language and the future: Choices and constraints’, John Edwards reminds us that state languages are not always much safer than stateless ones. Mark Fettes calls for more global perspectives on language issues in ‘Interlingualism: A world-centric approach to language policy and planning’. Such an approach could be promoted in several ways, ranging from technological innovation to Esperantism. The last three papers focus on education. Teresa Pica’s ‘Language education in the twenty-first century: A newly informed perspective’ deals with new, classroom-based approaches to language teaching. In ‘Language and language education in the United States in the twenty-first century’, Timothy Reagan presents two scenarios for American language teaching: a strict English-only option vs. genuine multilingualism. Finally, the answer to Humphrey Tonkin’s title question ‘Why learn foreign languages? Thoughts for a new millennium’ includes such justifications as self-understanding, the acquisition of social skills, and freedom. This is an engaging and accessible book by language experts who are not exclusively linguists. As is typical in such collections, the papers vary in both approach and quality. While some present language-political speculations, others read more like research reports. The volume as a whole is thought-provoking and its concerns are relevant for anyone working with languages. Janne Skaffari University of Turku Copyright © 2006 Linguistic Society of America
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.165 | 0.119 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".