Anna Wilson | University of Oxford (original) (raw)
Papers by Anna Wilson
Frontiers in Communication. 9:1356702, 2024
There is a need to develop new interdisciplinary approaches suitable for a more complete analysis... more There is a need to develop new interdisciplinary approaches suitable for a more complete analysis of multimodal data. Such approaches need to go beyond case studies and leverage technology to allow for statistically valid analysis of the data. Our study addresses this need by engaging with the research question of how humans communicate about the future for persuasive and manipulative purposes, and how they do this multimodally. It introduces a new methodology for computer-assisted multimodal analysis of video data. The study also introduces the resulting dataset, featuring annotations for speech (textual and acoustic modalities) and gesticulation and corporal behaviour (visual modality). To analyse and annotate the data and develop the methodology, the study engages with 23 26-min episodes of the show 'SophieCo Visionaries', broadcast by RT (formerly 'Russia Today').
Royal Society Open Science. 10: 230964, 2023
The use of disinformation and misinformation campaigns in the media has attracted much attention ... more The use of disinformation and misinformation campaigns in the media has attracted much attention from academics and policy-makers. Multimodal analysis or the analysis of two or more semiotic systems-language, gestures, images, sounds, among others-in their interrelation and interaction is essential to understanding dis-/misinformation efforts because most human communication goes beyond just words. There is a confluence of many disciplines (e.g. computer science, linguistics, political science, communication studies) that are developing methods and analytical models of multimodal communication. This literature review brings research strands from these disciplines together, providing a map of the multi-and interdisciplinary landscape for multimodal analysis of dis-/misinformation. It records the substantial growth starting from the second quarter of 2020the start of the COVID-19 epidemic in Western Europe-in the number of studies on multimodal dis-/misinformation coming from the field of computer science. The review examines that category of studies in more detail. Finally, the review identifies gaps in multimodal research on dis-/misinformation and suggests ways to bridge these gaps including future crossdisciplinary research directions. Our review provides scholars from different disciplines working on dis-/misinformation with a much needed bird's-eye view of the rapidly emerging research of multimodal dis-/misinformation.
Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference, 2023
This paper presents a new interdisciplinary methodology for the analysis of future conceptualisat... more This paper presents a new interdisciplinary methodology for the analysis of future conceptualisations in big messy media data. More specifically, it focuses on the depictions of post-Covid futures by RT during the pandemic, i.e. on data which are of interest not just from the perspective of academic research but also of policy engagement. The methodology has been developed to support the scaling up of fine-grained data-driven analysis of discourse utterances larger than individual lexical units which are centred around 'will' + the infinitive. It relies on the true integration of manual analytical and computational methods and tools in researching three modalitiestextual, prosodic 1 , and gestural. The paper describes the process of building a computational infrastructure for the collection and processing of video data, which aims to empower the manual analysis. It also shows how manual analysis can motivate the development of computational tools. The paper presents individual computational tools to demonstrate how the combination of human and machine approaches to analysis can reveal new manifestations of cohesion between gesture and prosody. To illustrate the latter, the paper shows how the boundaries of prosodic units can work to help determine the boundaries of gestural units for future conceptualisations.
The 1st Workshop on Linguistic Insights from and for Multimodal Language Processing, 2023
This paper introduces an open-source pipeline for the creation of multimodal corpora from YouTube... more This paper introduces an open-source pipeline for the creation of multimodal corpora from YouTube videos. It minimizes storage and bandwidth requirements, because the videos themselves need not be downloaded and can remain on YouTube’s servers. It also minimizes processing requirements by using YouTube’s automatically generated subtitles, thus avoiding
a computationally expensive automatic speech recognition processing step. The pipeline combines standard tools and provides as its output
a corpus file in the industry-standard vertical format used by many corpus managers. It is straightforwardly extensible with the addition of further levels of annotation and can be adapted to languages other than English.
Linguistics Vanguard, 2018
Research into the multimodal dimensions of human communication faces a set of distinctive methodo... more Research into the multimodal dimensions of human communication faces a set of distinctive methodological challenges. Collecting the datasets is resource-intensive, analysis often lacks peer validation, and the absence of shared datasets makes it difficult to develop standards. External validity is hampered by small datasets, yet large datasets are intractable. Red Hen Lab spearheads an international infrastructure for data-driven multimodal communication research, facilitating an integrated cross-disciplinary workflow. Linguists, communication scholars, statisticians, and computer scientists work together to develop research questions, annotate training sets, and develop pattern discovery and machine learning tools that handle vast collections of multimodal data, beyond the dreams of previous researchers. This infrastructure makes it possible for researchers at multiple sites to work in real-time in transdisciplinary teams. We review the vision, progress, and prospects of this resea...
Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2020
(Special Issue: Multimodal Research in Linguistics/ Guest Editor: Peter Uhrig) The study analy... more (Special Issue: Multimodal Research in Linguistics/ Guest Editor: Peter Uhrig)
The study analyses the RT USA show "The News with Rick Sanchez" to identify persuasive and manipulative communication strategies realised by the host's integration of speech and co-speech gestures. What cognitive systems, conceptual processes and schemas does the speaker employ to construct and communicate viewpoint? What linguistic and gestural units enable certain viewpoint construction? What role does social context play in the interpretation of these units? After a quantitative overview of the use of body-directed and related outward-directed gestures in 180 minutes of RT recordings, the study offers a fine-grained qualitative analysis of viewpoint construction behind four situations from these RT data. It develops an advanced cognitive-linguistic approach anchored in conceptual blending (Fauconnier and Turner 2002) and the cognitive system of force dynamics (Talmy 1988, 2000). The study argues that this approach is successful in revealing speech-gesture integrations as triggering viewpoint blending for the purpose of manipulation and is useful for transferring manual qualitative analysis to analysis at scale.
Linguistics Vanguard, 2018
Co-authors: Francis Steen, Cristóbal Pagán Cánovas, Anders Hougaard, Jungseock Joo, Inés Olza, An... more Co-authors: Francis Steen, Cristóbal Pagán Cánovas, Anders Hougaard, Jungseock Joo, Inés Olza, Anna Pleshakova, Soumya Ray, Peter Uhrig, Javier Valenzuela, Jacek Woźny, & Mark Turner
Abstract
Research into the multimodal dimensions of human communication faces a set of distinctive methodological challenges. Collecting the datasets is resource-intensive, analysis often lacks peer validation, and the absence of shared datasets makes it difficult to develop standards. External validity is hampered by small datasets, yet large datasets are intractable. Red Hen Lab spearheads an international infrastructure for data-driven multimodal communication research, facilitating an integrated cross-disciplinary workflow. Linguists, communication scholars, statisticians, and computer scientists work together to develop research questions, annotate training sets, and develop pattern discovery and machine learning tools that handle vast collections of multimodal data, beyond the dreams of previous researchers. This infrastructure makes it possible for researchers at multiple sites to work in real-time in transdisciplinary teams. We review the vision, progress, and prospects of this research consortium.
Keywords: multimodality; machine learning; automated parsing; corpora; research consortia
In this paper, I use the case of Dmitry Bykov's "Заразное" (Infectious) to explore meta-parody, a... more In this paper, I use the case of Dmitry Bykov's "Заразное" (Infectious) to explore meta-parody, a genre, which has received very little attention in literary studies and has not been explored from the cognitive poetic perspective so far. I investigate Bykov's performance of meta-parody as a new Russian hybrid genre event, related to the new Russian ideology of nationalism, as well as the respective Kremlin-sponsored media discourse. I adopt Steen's (2011) logic for cognition-based interdisciplinary analysis of genre. While making use of Hutcheon's investigation of parody (2000 and 2002) and Morson's description of meta-parody (1989), I explore meta-parody as a viewpoint blending network, focusing on revealing and examining types of linguistic viewpoint markers and (de-) compression operations (Dancygier 2012; Sweetser 2012) that prompt the network's construction. In so doing, I utilize blended joint attention (Turner 2014), conceptual blending (Fauconnier & Turner 2002), and viewpoint blending (Tobin & Israel 2012; Turner 2014), as the analytical tools, to elucidate the linguistic and conceptual, as well as multimodal, situational, socio-cultural, political, literary and historical aspects behind meta-parody's production and understanding. I argue that blending analysis helps to reveal the core construal and constraint operations underlying meta-parody, and to develop an interdisciplinary cognition-based methodological model for analysis of Bykov's parodic work, as constituting part of the contemporary Russian critical media discourse.
Keywords: cognitive poetics, conceptual blending, blended joint attention, viewpoint blending, (de-) compression, genre, meta-parody, parody, irony, deixis, cultural frames, metaphor, counter-factuality, multimodality, intertextuality, poetic blends, expository questions, Russian national identity, critical discourse analysis.
The article is available at https://lartis.sk/issue1-2016/
Russian Language Journal. A Journal of the American Council of Teachers of Russian, 2013
The world’s most pressing problems require solutions that cross disciplinary boundaries. Yet in ... more The world’s most pressing problems require solutions that cross disciplinary boundaries. Yet in an academy dominated by disciplinary thinking, interdisciplinarity is very challenging for researchers, teachers, and students. This is definitely the case in area studies which integrates numerous social sciences and humanities subjects.
Problem-based learning (PBL) is a promising teaching methodology for integrating multiple disciplines. However, the literature on problem-based learning does not adequately articulate the underlying cognitive processes required for interdisciplinary knowledge construction, particularly outside the clinical sciences.
We propose blending and conceptual integration as a theoretical foundation for interdisciplinary teaching and learning, particularly in area studies. We illustrate this theoretical approach with examples drawn from a masters courses on the culture of Russia and Eastern Europe – constituting an integral part of a degree programme.
We argue that understanding interdisciplinarity from a cognitive perspective allows both students and teachers to be more self-conscious about the practice of interdisciplinary studies, thereby enhancing the learning and teaching process.
This article presents a case study of the novel Russian metaphor oborotni v pogonakh (werewolves ... more This article presents a case study of the novel Russian metaphor oborotni v pogonakh (werewolves in epaulettes). The metaphor is analyzed using conceptual integration ) as a general model of cognitive framing with frame-blending (Turner, 2008), conceptual blending in discourse analysis , and the 'rethinking of metaphor' forming the core research method. The approach to metaphor analysis in the case study will include the consideration of permanent features of cognition: integration networks, cobbling and sculpting, emergent structure, compression, and overarching goals other than projection of inference . The study of this metaphor will be also based on the principles of conceptual blending in discourse analysis, central to which is "explaining how and why each linguistic cue prompts a certain kind of construction" (Oakley, 1998: 322; Coulson, 2001 and.
Proceedings of the Conference “La lengua y literature rusas en el espacio educativo internacional... more Proceedings of the Conference “La lengua y literature rusas en el espacio educativo internacional: estado actual y perspectivas”, University of Granada, 7-9 May 2007
Английский язык в профессиональной подготовке специалиста по социальной работе A.B. Плешакова & ... more Английский язык в профессиональной подготовке специалиста по социальной работе
A.B. Плешакова & E.P. Ярская Смирнова
Саратов, Саратовский государственный технический университет, 2002
(English for the Professional Preparation of Social Work Specialists)
A.V. Pleshakova & E.P. Iarskaia‐Smirnova
Saratov, Saratov State Technical University, 2002
127 pp., ISBN: 5‐7433‐1066‐1
From 'Review Essay' (2004), Social Work Education, 23:2, 241-246, DOI:
10.1080/0261547042000209233
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0261547042000209233
For this joint review we have grouped five bilingual social work dictionaries, i.e. dictionaries translating specific academic and/or professional terms pertaining to
education, research or practice. It is not a review of general dictionaries or general social science dictionaries, but one of social work-specific dictionaries. Such dictionaries are difficult to make and represent limited markets.
[...] Pleshakova & Iarskaia‐Smirnova starts with an English–Russian dictionary containing longer articles, followed by a Russian–English dictionary with shorter ones. In the appendix we find English conversation exercises on professional topics, a model CV as well as a list of contact addresses in Russia for obtaining American scholarships. Though limited in scope and scale, it is a precise and useful dictionary which will be useful to its target public: Russian social work students. It has been prepared and finalised with diligence. Comparing it to the Herrmann book is a strange experience: in terms of printing and binding, Pleshakova & Iarskaia‐Smirnova represents a minimalist solution, yet the content is excellent under all aspects. Herrmann is printed on good paper and has an attractive cover made from a good material, but the content is not dictionary standard. Interestingly, the Russian‐produced book comes from a provincial university, whereas the German dictionary was published by a big NGO at federal level with an important infrastructure.
This review has revealed considerable differences between the dictionaries in the sample—with regard to concepts, solutions and quality, including user‐friendliness. It is clear that the authors of bilingual, professional social work dictionaries face enormous difficulties and it may not seem very encouraging to prepare publications with such a narrow market. However, we believe that such books are needed and do hope that more of them will follow. Colleagues who want to help fill this gap should be encouraged, though obviously the usual standards for dictionaries must be met.
JACOB KORNBECK & MALGORZATA LASKOWSKA
Brussels, Belgium
Филологические этюды: Сб. науч. ст. молодых ученых. - Саратов: Изд-во Сарат. ун-та, 2002
Вопросы стилистики. Вып. 27. Человек и текст. Саратов: Изд-во Саратов. гос. ун-та., 1998
"Cultural and National Specificity in Construction of News about Proisshestvie" in Questions of S... more "Cultural and National Specificity in Construction of News about Proisshestvie" in Questions of Stylistics
ISBN 5-292-02140-7
Frontiers in Communication. 9:1356702, 2024
There is a need to develop new interdisciplinary approaches suitable for a more complete analysis... more There is a need to develop new interdisciplinary approaches suitable for a more complete analysis of multimodal data. Such approaches need to go beyond case studies and leverage technology to allow for statistically valid analysis of the data. Our study addresses this need by engaging with the research question of how humans communicate about the future for persuasive and manipulative purposes, and how they do this multimodally. It introduces a new methodology for computer-assisted multimodal analysis of video data. The study also introduces the resulting dataset, featuring annotations for speech (textual and acoustic modalities) and gesticulation and corporal behaviour (visual modality). To analyse and annotate the data and develop the methodology, the study engages with 23 26-min episodes of the show 'SophieCo Visionaries', broadcast by RT (formerly 'Russia Today').
Royal Society Open Science. 10: 230964, 2023
The use of disinformation and misinformation campaigns in the media has attracted much attention ... more The use of disinformation and misinformation campaigns in the media has attracted much attention from academics and policy-makers. Multimodal analysis or the analysis of two or more semiotic systems-language, gestures, images, sounds, among others-in their interrelation and interaction is essential to understanding dis-/misinformation efforts because most human communication goes beyond just words. There is a confluence of many disciplines (e.g. computer science, linguistics, political science, communication studies) that are developing methods and analytical models of multimodal communication. This literature review brings research strands from these disciplines together, providing a map of the multi-and interdisciplinary landscape for multimodal analysis of dis-/misinformation. It records the substantial growth starting from the second quarter of 2020the start of the COVID-19 epidemic in Western Europe-in the number of studies on multimodal dis-/misinformation coming from the field of computer science. The review examines that category of studies in more detail. Finally, the review identifies gaps in multimodal research on dis-/misinformation and suggests ways to bridge these gaps including future crossdisciplinary research directions. Our review provides scholars from different disciplines working on dis-/misinformation with a much needed bird's-eye view of the rapidly emerging research of multimodal dis-/misinformation.
Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference, 2023
This paper presents a new interdisciplinary methodology for the analysis of future conceptualisat... more This paper presents a new interdisciplinary methodology for the analysis of future conceptualisations in big messy media data. More specifically, it focuses on the depictions of post-Covid futures by RT during the pandemic, i.e. on data which are of interest not just from the perspective of academic research but also of policy engagement. The methodology has been developed to support the scaling up of fine-grained data-driven analysis of discourse utterances larger than individual lexical units which are centred around 'will' + the infinitive. It relies on the true integration of manual analytical and computational methods and tools in researching three modalitiestextual, prosodic 1 , and gestural. The paper describes the process of building a computational infrastructure for the collection and processing of video data, which aims to empower the manual analysis. It also shows how manual analysis can motivate the development of computational tools. The paper presents individual computational tools to demonstrate how the combination of human and machine approaches to analysis can reveal new manifestations of cohesion between gesture and prosody. To illustrate the latter, the paper shows how the boundaries of prosodic units can work to help determine the boundaries of gestural units for future conceptualisations.
The 1st Workshop on Linguistic Insights from and for Multimodal Language Processing, 2023
This paper introduces an open-source pipeline for the creation of multimodal corpora from YouTube... more This paper introduces an open-source pipeline for the creation of multimodal corpora from YouTube videos. It minimizes storage and bandwidth requirements, because the videos themselves need not be downloaded and can remain on YouTube’s servers. It also minimizes processing requirements by using YouTube’s automatically generated subtitles, thus avoiding
a computationally expensive automatic speech recognition processing step. The pipeline combines standard tools and provides as its output
a corpus file in the industry-standard vertical format used by many corpus managers. It is straightforwardly extensible with the addition of further levels of annotation and can be adapted to languages other than English.
Linguistics Vanguard, 2018
Research into the multimodal dimensions of human communication faces a set of distinctive methodo... more Research into the multimodal dimensions of human communication faces a set of distinctive methodological challenges. Collecting the datasets is resource-intensive, analysis often lacks peer validation, and the absence of shared datasets makes it difficult to develop standards. External validity is hampered by small datasets, yet large datasets are intractable. Red Hen Lab spearheads an international infrastructure for data-driven multimodal communication research, facilitating an integrated cross-disciplinary workflow. Linguists, communication scholars, statisticians, and computer scientists work together to develop research questions, annotate training sets, and develop pattern discovery and machine learning tools that handle vast collections of multimodal data, beyond the dreams of previous researchers. This infrastructure makes it possible for researchers at multiple sites to work in real-time in transdisciplinary teams. We review the vision, progress, and prospects of this resea...
Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2020
(Special Issue: Multimodal Research in Linguistics/ Guest Editor: Peter Uhrig) The study analy... more (Special Issue: Multimodal Research in Linguistics/ Guest Editor: Peter Uhrig)
The study analyses the RT USA show "The News with Rick Sanchez" to identify persuasive and manipulative communication strategies realised by the host's integration of speech and co-speech gestures. What cognitive systems, conceptual processes and schemas does the speaker employ to construct and communicate viewpoint? What linguistic and gestural units enable certain viewpoint construction? What role does social context play in the interpretation of these units? After a quantitative overview of the use of body-directed and related outward-directed gestures in 180 minutes of RT recordings, the study offers a fine-grained qualitative analysis of viewpoint construction behind four situations from these RT data. It develops an advanced cognitive-linguistic approach anchored in conceptual blending (Fauconnier and Turner 2002) and the cognitive system of force dynamics (Talmy 1988, 2000). The study argues that this approach is successful in revealing speech-gesture integrations as triggering viewpoint blending for the purpose of manipulation and is useful for transferring manual qualitative analysis to analysis at scale.
Linguistics Vanguard, 2018
Co-authors: Francis Steen, Cristóbal Pagán Cánovas, Anders Hougaard, Jungseock Joo, Inés Olza, An... more Co-authors: Francis Steen, Cristóbal Pagán Cánovas, Anders Hougaard, Jungseock Joo, Inés Olza, Anna Pleshakova, Soumya Ray, Peter Uhrig, Javier Valenzuela, Jacek Woźny, & Mark Turner
Abstract
Research into the multimodal dimensions of human communication faces a set of distinctive methodological challenges. Collecting the datasets is resource-intensive, analysis often lacks peer validation, and the absence of shared datasets makes it difficult to develop standards. External validity is hampered by small datasets, yet large datasets are intractable. Red Hen Lab spearheads an international infrastructure for data-driven multimodal communication research, facilitating an integrated cross-disciplinary workflow. Linguists, communication scholars, statisticians, and computer scientists work together to develop research questions, annotate training sets, and develop pattern discovery and machine learning tools that handle vast collections of multimodal data, beyond the dreams of previous researchers. This infrastructure makes it possible for researchers at multiple sites to work in real-time in transdisciplinary teams. We review the vision, progress, and prospects of this research consortium.
Keywords: multimodality; machine learning; automated parsing; corpora; research consortia
In this paper, I use the case of Dmitry Bykov's "Заразное" (Infectious) to explore meta-parody, a... more In this paper, I use the case of Dmitry Bykov's "Заразное" (Infectious) to explore meta-parody, a genre, which has received very little attention in literary studies and has not been explored from the cognitive poetic perspective so far. I investigate Bykov's performance of meta-parody as a new Russian hybrid genre event, related to the new Russian ideology of nationalism, as well as the respective Kremlin-sponsored media discourse. I adopt Steen's (2011) logic for cognition-based interdisciplinary analysis of genre. While making use of Hutcheon's investigation of parody (2000 and 2002) and Morson's description of meta-parody (1989), I explore meta-parody as a viewpoint blending network, focusing on revealing and examining types of linguistic viewpoint markers and (de-) compression operations (Dancygier 2012; Sweetser 2012) that prompt the network's construction. In so doing, I utilize blended joint attention (Turner 2014), conceptual blending (Fauconnier & Turner 2002), and viewpoint blending (Tobin & Israel 2012; Turner 2014), as the analytical tools, to elucidate the linguistic and conceptual, as well as multimodal, situational, socio-cultural, political, literary and historical aspects behind meta-parody's production and understanding. I argue that blending analysis helps to reveal the core construal and constraint operations underlying meta-parody, and to develop an interdisciplinary cognition-based methodological model for analysis of Bykov's parodic work, as constituting part of the contemporary Russian critical media discourse.
Keywords: cognitive poetics, conceptual blending, blended joint attention, viewpoint blending, (de-) compression, genre, meta-parody, parody, irony, deixis, cultural frames, metaphor, counter-factuality, multimodality, intertextuality, poetic blends, expository questions, Russian national identity, critical discourse analysis.
The article is available at https://lartis.sk/issue1-2016/
Russian Language Journal. A Journal of the American Council of Teachers of Russian, 2013
The world’s most pressing problems require solutions that cross disciplinary boundaries. Yet in ... more The world’s most pressing problems require solutions that cross disciplinary boundaries. Yet in an academy dominated by disciplinary thinking, interdisciplinarity is very challenging for researchers, teachers, and students. This is definitely the case in area studies which integrates numerous social sciences and humanities subjects.
Problem-based learning (PBL) is a promising teaching methodology for integrating multiple disciplines. However, the literature on problem-based learning does not adequately articulate the underlying cognitive processes required for interdisciplinary knowledge construction, particularly outside the clinical sciences.
We propose blending and conceptual integration as a theoretical foundation for interdisciplinary teaching and learning, particularly in area studies. We illustrate this theoretical approach with examples drawn from a masters courses on the culture of Russia and Eastern Europe – constituting an integral part of a degree programme.
We argue that understanding interdisciplinarity from a cognitive perspective allows both students and teachers to be more self-conscious about the practice of interdisciplinary studies, thereby enhancing the learning and teaching process.
This article presents a case study of the novel Russian metaphor oborotni v pogonakh (werewolves ... more This article presents a case study of the novel Russian metaphor oborotni v pogonakh (werewolves in epaulettes). The metaphor is analyzed using conceptual integration ) as a general model of cognitive framing with frame-blending (Turner, 2008), conceptual blending in discourse analysis , and the 'rethinking of metaphor' forming the core research method. The approach to metaphor analysis in the case study will include the consideration of permanent features of cognition: integration networks, cobbling and sculpting, emergent structure, compression, and overarching goals other than projection of inference . The study of this metaphor will be also based on the principles of conceptual blending in discourse analysis, central to which is "explaining how and why each linguistic cue prompts a certain kind of construction" (Oakley, 1998: 322; Coulson, 2001 and.
Proceedings of the Conference “La lengua y literature rusas en el espacio educativo internacional... more Proceedings of the Conference “La lengua y literature rusas en el espacio educativo internacional: estado actual y perspectivas”, University of Granada, 7-9 May 2007
Английский язык в профессиональной подготовке специалиста по социальной работе A.B. Плешакова & ... more Английский язык в профессиональной подготовке специалиста по социальной работе
A.B. Плешакова & E.P. Ярская Смирнова
Саратов, Саратовский государственный технический университет, 2002
(English for the Professional Preparation of Social Work Specialists)
A.V. Pleshakova & E.P. Iarskaia‐Smirnova
Saratov, Saratov State Technical University, 2002
127 pp., ISBN: 5‐7433‐1066‐1
From 'Review Essay' (2004), Social Work Education, 23:2, 241-246, DOI:
10.1080/0261547042000209233
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0261547042000209233
For this joint review we have grouped five bilingual social work dictionaries, i.e. dictionaries translating specific academic and/or professional terms pertaining to
education, research or practice. It is not a review of general dictionaries or general social science dictionaries, but one of social work-specific dictionaries. Such dictionaries are difficult to make and represent limited markets.
[...] Pleshakova & Iarskaia‐Smirnova starts with an English–Russian dictionary containing longer articles, followed by a Russian–English dictionary with shorter ones. In the appendix we find English conversation exercises on professional topics, a model CV as well as a list of contact addresses in Russia for obtaining American scholarships. Though limited in scope and scale, it is a precise and useful dictionary which will be useful to its target public: Russian social work students. It has been prepared and finalised with diligence. Comparing it to the Herrmann book is a strange experience: in terms of printing and binding, Pleshakova & Iarskaia‐Smirnova represents a minimalist solution, yet the content is excellent under all aspects. Herrmann is printed on good paper and has an attractive cover made from a good material, but the content is not dictionary standard. Interestingly, the Russian‐produced book comes from a provincial university, whereas the German dictionary was published by a big NGO at federal level with an important infrastructure.
This review has revealed considerable differences between the dictionaries in the sample—with regard to concepts, solutions and quality, including user‐friendliness. It is clear that the authors of bilingual, professional social work dictionaries face enormous difficulties and it may not seem very encouraging to prepare publications with such a narrow market. However, we believe that such books are needed and do hope that more of them will follow. Colleagues who want to help fill this gap should be encouraged, though obviously the usual standards for dictionaries must be met.
JACOB KORNBECK & MALGORZATA LASKOWSKA
Brussels, Belgium
Филологические этюды: Сб. науч. ст. молодых ученых. - Саратов: Изд-во Сарат. ун-та, 2002
Вопросы стилистики. Вып. 27. Человек и текст. Саратов: Изд-во Саратов. гос. ун-та., 1998
"Cultural and National Specificity in Construction of News about Proisshestvie" in Questions of S... more "Cultural and National Specificity in Construction of News about Proisshestvie" in Questions of Stylistics
ISBN 5-292-02140-7