Appunti completi esame Lingua inglese I

False Friends

English False Friend Italian Translation

Italian False Friend English translation

Actually In realtà Attualmente Currently

Annoyed Infastidito,seccato Annoiato Bored

Argument Litigio Argomento Subject

Brave Coraggioso Bravo Good,clever

Confection Caramella Confezione Wrapping

Corpse Cadavere Corpo Body

Cucumber Cetriolo Cocomero Watermelon

Definitely Certamente Definitivamente Ultimately

Education Istruzione Educazione Upbringing

Eventually Alla fine Eventualmente Possibly

Finally Alla fine Finalmente About time

Ingenuity Ingegnosità Ingenuità Naivety

Lecture Conferenza Lettura Reading

Luxury Lusso Lussuria Lust

Make sense Aver senso Far senso To disgust

Morbid Morboso Morbido Soft,tender

Policy Piano,politica Polizia Police

Process Elaborare Processare To put on trial

Rumor Pettegolezzo Rumore Noise

Sensible Assennato Sensibile Sensitive

Symphatetic Compassionevole Simpatico Likeable

Vacacy Posto vacante Vacanza Holiday

What is a corpus?

A corpus (plural: corpora) is a large

A corpus is a collection of authentic texts that have been stored on a computerised database.

Any collection of more than one text can be called a corpus (as corpus is Latin for 'body', hence a corpus is any body of written or spoken text).

A corpus helps us to understand more about the language and how people use it.

Corpus linguistic is the study of language through the use of corpora and the observation of 'real' language.

What types of corpora can we find?

There are many different kinds of corpora. They can contain written or spoken (transcribed) language, modern or old texts, texts from one language or several languages. The texts can be whole books, newspapers, journals, speeches etc, or consist of extracts of varying length. The kind of texts included and the combination of different texts vary between different corpora and corpus types.

'General corpora' consist of general texts, texts that do not belong to a single text type, subject field, or register.

An example of a general corpus is the British National Corpus. Some corpora contain texts that are sampled (chosen from) a particular variety of a language, for example, from a particular dialect or from a particular subject area. These corpora are sometimes called 'Sublanguage Corpora'.

Corpora can consist of texts in one language (or language variety) only or of texts in more than one language. If the texts are the same in all languages, e.i. translations, the corpus is called a Parallel Corpus. A Comparable Corpus is a collection of "similar" text.

Examples of corpora:

• The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of British English, both spoken and written, from the late twentieth century.
• The cobuild team (Collins Birmingham University International Language Database) is a 200 million word collection and consists of a

A set of researchers working in the Sinclairian tradition and using the vast Bank of English corpus to produce reference works such as the COBUILD dictionary, English grammar, and grammar patterns books.

Concordancer

A concordancer is a computer program that automatically constructs a concordance. Concordancers are used in corpus linguistics to retrieve alphabetically or otherwise sorted lists of linguistic data from the corpus in question, which the corpus linguist then analyzes.

Concordance lines

• A corpus organises the texts in concordance lines using a special concordance software called concordancer.
• A concordance line or string is a single line of text, often with words cut off at the beginning and at the end of the line.
• The focus of the concordance line is the Key Word in Context (KWIC).

Suggested uses: Lextutor

• Generally, to check your intuition (i.e. if you think you know already).
• To check whether a word is really used in a context that you think it is used.

different patterns of sounds in different languages, or within each language, different patterns of sounds in different positions in words etc. Phonology is the study of the sound system of languages. It is a huge area of language theory and it is difficult to do more on a general language course than have an outline knowledge of what it includes. A phoneme is the linguistic utterance of a single sound segment. A phoneme is the single sound also called segment. It is the smallest phonetic unit in a language that is capable of conveying a distinction in meaning, as the /r/ of rat and the /b/ of bat in English. Phonemes are usually enclosed in slanted brackets / /. In fact these are used when a sound is discussed phonologically. When the sound is articulated, the phonemes are enclosed in square brackets [ ]. Graphemes are enclosed in < > Phonetics deals with the production of speech sounds by humans, often without prior knowledge of the language being spoken. It is the study of the way humans make,

Transmit and receive speech sounds. It is divided into three main branches:

• Articulatory phonetics is the study of the way the vocal organs are used to produce speech sounds.
• Acoustic phonetics is the study of physical properties of speech sounds.
• Auditory phonetics is the study of the way people perceive speech sounds.

Consonants

In phonetics, consonants are classified considering:

• Place of articulation (what part of the mouth we use)
• Manner of articulation (how we use this part of the mouth)

(Voicing)

Voiced consonants are produced with the vocal cords drawn together, creating a vibration effect.

Unvoiced consonants are produced with the vocal cords spread apart, therefore there is no vibration of the vocal cords. The sound system

Key: 1. tongue tip; 2. blade of the tongue; 3. front of the tongue; 4. centre of the tongue; 5. back of the tongue

Consonants are articulated with a closing movement or a complete closure of one of the vocal organs (lips, tongue, soft palate, etc.).

Consonanti

• Can be voiced (articulated with vibration of the vocal cords) or voiceless (no vibration, but pronounced with greater force)
• Unlike vowels also make use of the nasal tract.

Occlusive - plosives

• Bilabiali: le labbra si serrano o accostano l'una contro l'altra
• Apico-dentali: l'apice della lingua si oppone ai denti superiori sotto le gengive
• Apico-alveolari: l'apice della lingua si oppone alle gengive (alveoli) dei denti superiori
• Dorso-velari: il dorso della lingua si oppone al palato molle o velopendulo

The sound /b/ /p/: the mouth is in the same position for both sounds, however in the sound /b/ there is voice from the throat. In /p/, there is no voice from the throat. Instead there is a small explosion of air when the lips open.

The sound /d/ and /t/: in the sound /d/ there is voice from the throat. In /t/ there is no voice from the throat. Instead there is a small explosion of air out of the mouth when the tongue moves away from the ridge behind the teeth.

The sound /g/ and /k/: in the sound /g/ there is voice from the throat. In /k/ there is no voice from the throat. When you say this sound, you can feel the air on your hand when you put it in front of your mouth.

Spiranti-fricative

The sound /s/ and /z/: When you say the alphabet, the letters/graphemes <C> and <S> are pronounced /si:/ and /es/. Notice that both have the consonant sound /s/. But <S> is also often pronounced as the consonant sound /z/. In the sound /s/ there is no voice from the throat. It sounds like the noise of a snake. In the sound /z/ there is voice from the throat. It sounds like the noise of a bee.

The glottal stop or glottalisation

The glottal stop occurs when the space between the vocal cords (the glottis) is closed completely, very briefly and then released like in the pronunciation of plosives /p, t, k/ - stop [sto?p], etc.

• In RP a /t/ is produced as a glottal stop before consonants, except -l, (Ex: hot day)
• Most British English speakers will use it

For the first /t/ in fortnight, where a consonant follows immediately:

• Typical of urban accents of BrE or AmE where often /t/ between vowels is replaced in words like Pe’erson (Peterson). (also bottle [bo?ļ], Gatwick [gæ?wık], etc)
• Speakers of Cockney and many other dialects will also use it for the /t/ between vowels in city. It is variably present at word boundaries where a vowel follows at the beginning of the next word, as with the final /t/ of "sort" in sort of.

Definitions:

A phone or phoneme is a single sound that creates variation of sound and semantic opposition.

When 2 words such as pet and pat differ only by one phoneme, occurring in the same position, the words are described as minimal pairs in the phonology of English.

Big-pig-rig-fig-dig-wig is a minimal set.

• In natural speech production sounds occur in groups in fast succession so individual sounds are influenced by the sounds around them.
• If /t/ occurs before a vowel it is aspirated more than

If it occurs before a /r/. Ex. Say: table and train.

• In some varieties of English (American English, Cockney) [t] can have up to 6 different realisations, these are called phonetic variants or allophones.
• In transcription they are represented by diacritic symbols added to the phonemic ones.
• They do not involve any change of meaning but differences in accents.

Allophones

When we have a set of phones that are all versions of one phoneme we refer to them as allophones. An allophone is a phonetic variant of a phoneme in a particular language.

The liquid /r/

• A Palato-alveolar liquid
• RP is a non-rhotic accent: only pre-vocalic /r/ is pronounced whereas post-vocalic /r/ is silent. E.g. red [red], car [ka:] and hard [ha:d].
• Linking-r: if a word ending in a silent /r/ is followed by a vowel then th