Explaining the Meaning of Words : A Descriptive Study on Strategies

Scholarly Paper (Advanced Seminar) aus dem Jahr 2006 im Fachbereich Anglistik - Linguistik, einseitig bedruckt, Note: 1,0, Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen (English Seminar/Applied English Linguistics), Veranstaltung: HS Lexical Semantics, 11 Eintragungen im Literaturverzeichnis, Sprache: Englisch, Anmerkungen: The study (32 short video interviews, transcripts included) was carried out at Uni Tübingen, with the aim to find out about oral discoursive strategies for explaining words. The approach is based on a combination of constructivist and cognitively oriented linguistic concepts with a number of more traditional ones. , Abstract: This paper seeks to describe and analyze typical strategies employed for explaining unknown words. The empirical component is based on a small video-corpus comprising 4x6 interviews with native as well as non-native speakers of English, transcripts are included in the Appendix. The material is analyzed by means of a theoretical apparatus taken from lexical semantics and pragmatics.