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Macmillan English Dictionary For Advanced Learners
''Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners'', also known as ''MEDAL'', was first published in 2002 by Macmillan Education. ''MEDAL'' is an advanced learner’s dictionary and shares most of the features of this type of dictionary: it provides definitions in simple language, using a controlled defining vocabulary; most words have example sentences to illustrate how they are typically used; and information is given about how words combine grammatically or in collocations. ''MEDAL'' also introduced a number of innovations. These include: * ‘collocation boxes’ giving lists of high-frequency collocates, identified using Sketch Engine software * word frequency information, with the most frequent 7500 English words shown in red and categorised in three frequency bands, based on the idea, derived from Zipf's law, that a relatively small number of high-frequency words account for a high percentage of most texts * ‘metaphor boxes’, showing how the vocabulary used for expre ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Macmillan Education
Macmillan Education is a publisher of English Language teaching and school curriculum materials. The company is based in London and operates in over 40 countries worldwide. History In 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd was fined GBP 11.3 million by the High Court in London, in respect of gains through corruption by Macmillan Education in East and West Africa between 2002 and 2009. Subsequently, Macmillan Education stopped operating in East and West Africa. In December 2011, Bedford, Freeman, and Worth Publishing Group, Macmillan's higher education group, changed its name to Macmillan Higher Education while retaining the Bedford, Freeman, and Worth name for its K–12 educational unit. Until 2015, when it was merged into Springer Nature, Macmillan Education was a division of Macmillan Publishers Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of Holtzbrinck Publishing Group Holtzbrinck Publishing Group () is a privately held German company based in Stuttgart which owns publishing companies worldw ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Defining Vocabulary
A defining vocabulary is a list of words used by lexicographers to write dictionary definitions. The underlying principle goes back to Samuel Johnson's notion that words should be defined using 'terms less abstruse than that which is to be explained', and a defining vocabulary provides the lexicographer with a restricted list of high-frequency words which can be used for producing simple definitions of any word in the dictionary. Defining vocabularies are especially common in English monolingual learner's dictionaries. The first such dictionary to use a defining vocabulary was the ''New Method English Dictionary'' by Michael West and James Endicott (published in 1935), a small dictionary written using a defining vocabulary of just 1,490 words. When the ''Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English'' was first published in 1978, its most striking feature was its use of a 2,000-word defining vocabulary based on Michael West's General Service List, and since then defining vocabulari ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Collocation
In corpus linguistics, a collocation is a series of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, a collocation is a type of compositional phraseme, meaning that it can be understood from the words that make it up. This contrasts with an idiom, where the meaning of the whole cannot be inferred from its parts, and may be completely unrelated. An example of a phraseological collocation is the expression ''strong tea''. While the same meaning could be conveyed by the roughly equivalent ''powerful tea'', this adjective does not modify ''tea'' frequently enough for English speakers to become accustomed to its co-occurrence and regard it as idiomatic or unmarked. (By way of counterexample, ''powerful'' is idiomatically preferred to ''strong'' when modifying a ''computer'' or a ''car''.) There are about six main types of collocations: adjective + noun, noun + noun (such as collective nouns), verb + noun, adverb ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sketch Engine
Sketch Engine is a corpus manager and text analysis software developed by Lexical Computing CZ s.r.o. since 2003. Its purpose is to enable people studying language behaviour ( lexicographers, researchers in corpus linguistics, translators or language learners) to search large text collections according to complex and linguistically motivated queries. Sketch Engine gained its name after one of the key features, word sketches: one-page, automatic, corpus-derived summaries of a word's grammatical and collocational behaviour. Currently, it supports and provides corpora in 90+ languages. History of development Sketch Engine is a product of Lexical Computing Limited, a company founded in 2003 by the lexicographer and research scientist Adam Kilgarriff. He started a collaboration with Pavel Rychlý, a computer scientist working at the Natural Language Processing Centre, Masaryk University, and the developer of Manatee and Bonito (two major parts of the software suite), and introduced ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Lakoff
George Philip Lakoff (; born May 24, 1941) is an American cognitive linguistics, cognitive linguist and philosopher, best known for his thesis that people's lives are significantly influenced by the conceptual metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena. The conceptual metaphor thesis, introduced in his and Mark Johnson (philosopher), Mark Johnson's 1980 book ''Metaphors We Live By'' has found applications in a number of academic disciplines. Applying it to politics, literature, philosophy and mathematics has led Lakoff into territory normally considered basic to political science. In his 1996 book ''Moral Politics'', Lakoff described Conservatism, conservative voters as being influenced by the "strict father model" as a central metaphor for such a complex phenomenon as the State (polity), state, and Liberalism, liberal/Progressivism, progressive voters as being influenced by the "nurturant parent model" as the folk psychology, folk psychological metaphor for this complex phen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Conceptual Metaphor
In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor, or cognitive metaphor, refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain, in terms of another. An example of this is the understanding of quantity in terms of directionality (e.g. "the price of peace is ''rising''") or the understanding of time in terms of money (e.g. "I ''spent'' time at work today"). A conceptual domain can be any mental organization of human experience. The regularity with which different languages employ the same metaphors, often perceptually based, has led to the hypothesis that the mapping between conceptual domains corresponds to neural mappings in the brain. This theory has gained wide attention, although some researchers question its empirical accuracy. This idea, and a detailed examination of the underlying processes, was first extensively explored by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their work ''Metaphors We Live By'' in 1980. Since then, the field of metaphor studies within the larger discip ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Louvain-la-Neuve
Louvain-la-Neuve (, French for ''New Leuven''; wa, Li Noû Lovén) is a planned town in the municipality of Ottignies-Louvain-la-Neuve, Wallonia, Belgium, situated 30 km southeast of Brussels, in the province of Walloon Brabant. The town was built to house the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain) which owns its entire territory; following the linguistic quarrels that took place in Belgium during the 1960s, and Flemish claims of discrimination at the Catholic University of Leuven, the institution was split into the Dutch language Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven), which remained in Leuven, and the Université catholique de Louvain. To a great extent, it still lives following the rhythms of the university that is its raison d'être. However, with the construction of ''L'Esplanade'' shopping complex, the '' Aula Magna'' exhibition centre and auditorium, a large cinema complex, and five museums, it is beginning to grow beyond its academic roots. History Langua ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Belgium
Belgium, ; french: Belgique ; german: Belgien officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. The country is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to the southwest, and the North Sea to the northwest. It covers an area of and has a population of more than 11.5 million, making it the 22nd most densely populated country in the world and the 6th most densely populated country in Europe, with a density of . Belgium is part of an area known as the Low Countries, historically a somewhat larger region than the Benelux group of states, as it also included parts of northern France. The capital and largest city is Brussels; other major cities are Antwerp, Ghent, Charleroi, Liège, Bruges, Namur, and Leuven. Belgium is a sovereign state and a federal constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system. Its institutional organization is complex and is structured on both regional ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sylviane Granger
Sylviane Granger (born 5 July 1951) is a Belgian linguist and emeritus professor of the University of Louvain (UCLouvain). She is the founder of the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics (CECL) and is best known for her pioneering work in the field of Learner Corpus Research. She has mainly published in the areas of corpus linguistics, learner language, contrastive linguistics, translation studies and lexicography. Career Sylviane Granger completed her entire career at UCLouvain. After studying English and Dutch philology, she started as a research fellow at the FNRS in 1972. She later took on a teaching assistant position in English language and linguistics, and in 1981 she obtained her PhD under the supervision of Jacques Van Roey. Her PhD dissertation was about the use of ''be + past participle'' in spoken English with a special focus on the passive. She then continued her career as a professor in English language and linguistics. In 1991, she founded the Centre for Engli ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Electronic Dictionary
An electronic dictionary is a dictionary whose data exists in digital form and can be accessed through a number of different media. Electronic dictionaries can be found in several forms, including software installed on tablet or desktop computers, mobile apps, web applications, and as a built-in function of E-readers. They may be free or require payment. Information Most of the early electronic dictionaries were, in effect, print dictionaries made available in digital form: the content was identical, but the electronic editions provided users with more powerful search functions. But soon the opportunities offered by digital media began to be exploited. Two obvious advantages are that limitations of space (and the need to optimize its use) become less pressing, so additional content can be provided; and the possibility arises of including multimedia content, such as audio pronunciations and video clips. Electronic dictionary databases, especially those included with software d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
