Carol A. Chapelle - The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics

The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics is the result of many years of work by a large group of people who shared their expertise to define and explain applied linguistics to a wide audience of prospective readers. It began with the compilation of The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics , which was published by Wiley Blackwell online in 2012 and in print in 2013. The conception of the original Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics benefited from the expertise of an advisory board consisting of established leaders in the field: Lyle F. Bachman, Heidi Byrnes, Dorothy M. Chun, Malcolm Coulthard, Alan Davies, Susan M. Gass, Nancy H. Hornberger, Gabriele Kasper, Claire Kramsch, Elana Shohamy, and Bernard Spolsky. I am grateful to the advisory board for their guidance in building the robust architecture for the Encyclopedia , which has stood the test of time. It is currently in use in over 1,000 libraries in more than 50 countries throughout the world.

I thank the area editors who conceptualized how each of the 27 topics in The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics should be elaborated and then worked with the authors to develop each topic to reflect the relevant expertise. The following people worked diligently in this capacity: Karin Aijmer, Claudia V. Angelelli, Brian Baer, Jasone Cenoz, Thomas Cobb, Ulla Connor, Patricia Friedrich, Marta González‐Lloret, Durk Gorter, Nadja Grbic, Marianne Gullberg, Dorothea Halbe, Linda Harklau, Joan Jamieson, Rodney H. Jones, Krzysztof Kredens, Eva Lam, John Levis, Angel Lin, Joseph Lo Bianco, Aya Matsuda, Kim McDonough, Kristian Mortensen, Murray J. Munro, Sigrid Norris, Amy Snyder Ohta, Lourdes Ortega, Lia Plakans, Karen Risager, Meryl Siegal, Michael Stubbs, Thomas A. Upton, Johannes Wagner, John Williams, and Brent Wolter.

The expertise of the area editors and their respective authors resulted in such a useful collection that in 2017 data captured in the electronic version of The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics indicated the entries had been visited over half a million times. The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics containing updated versions of some original entries is the direct result of the quality and utility of the original work of the area editors and authors for The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics .

I would also like to express my appreciation for the authors who contributed to The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics by updating the original entries of The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics to include recent work in their respective areas. In the large majority of cases, the original authors kindly agreed to contribute their expertise again by updating their entries. In some cases, new authors graciously agreed to join the project by contributing their time and knowledge to the updating project. I am grateful to all of the authors for sharing their expertise and for their attention to deadlines and other requests.

The professionals at Wiley Blackwell are also deserving of gratitude for applying their ingenuity, skills, and judgment to the creation and maintenance of The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics . With respect to The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics , I extend my sincere thanks to Tanya McMullin, the commissioning editor for linguistics, for reviving the dormant Concise Encyclopedia concept with unstoppable enthusiasm and purpose. I am grateful for the guidance of Elke Morice‐Atkinson and her know‐how in the area of major reference works, and for the professional production staff. I want to extend my sincerest thanks to the project manager, Eileen G. Chetti, whose extraordinary management skills and unwavering dedication to the project have been essential for the creation of The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics .

CAROL A. CHAPELLE

Ames, IA, USA

LEO FRANCIS HOYE

Adverbs often get a bad press. No other part of speech incites such vitriol. In his skit on the vagaries of English grammar and the uses of adverbs in particular, Mark Twain writes: “I am dead to adverbs; they cannot excite me. To misplace an adverb is a thing which I am able to do with frozen indifference” (Twain, 1880, p. 850). Twain is not alone in excoriating this hapless part of speech. Stephen King wades in with

I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs . . . they're like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day . . . fifty the day after that . . . and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally , completely , and profligately covered with dandelions. (King, 2000, p. 95)

The novelist/screenwriter Elmore Leonard caps this with his injunction: “If an adverb became a character in one of my books, I'd have it shot. Immediately” (D'Agostino, 2009, p. 86). Henry James is among the few to protest their worth: “I'm glad you like adverbs—I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect” (James, 1920, pp. 214–15). Although largely optional, if used purposefully, adverbs can add meaning to other clause elements, such as adjectives, other adverbs, nouns, verbs, even entire clauses. Ending an interview with the wife of a suspect, a detective enjoins: “‘Perhaps you would notify us, if he returns?’ ‘Oh definitely , surely , absolutely , no doubt about it’” (Furst, 2010, p. 23). Cull the adverbs (italicized) and the exchange comes to an ungainly halt: “‘You would notify us, if he returns?’ ‘Oh yes.’” The oblique command and the unease this engenders are gone. Syntactically mobile and semantically diverse, adverbs cover a range of meanings and grammatical functions; they are unique (adjectives excepted) in the number and variety that may co‐occur in a sentence, as the Furst extract demonstrates.

Adverbs can be used at best to marked effect; at worst, to create a verbal swamp. Their sheer diversity of use and function has earned them a maverick status as “the most nebulous and puzzling of the traditional word classes” (Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, & Svartvik, 1985, p. 438). Adverbs are heterogeneous: Their miscellany of assorted features has fueled the argument that, where a word cannot be assigned to another word class (such as noun, verb, adjective), it must be an adverb by default, rendering this a “catch‐all” or “residual” category (Huddleston & Pullum, 2002, p. 563). Such heterogeneity makes for considerable semantic and syntactic diversity—something of a linguistic smorgasbord or a “rag‐bag category” (Hasselgård, 2010, p. 3)! None of these assessments should bolster a negative view of their significance: “Adverbials are fascinating because of their enormous semantic and syntactic flexibility, as well as their elusiveness. In many ways a functional study of adverbials thus becomes a study of text and language in general” (Hasselgård, 2010, p. vii). In profiling their main features, this entry seeks to highlight the role and significance of adverbs for our everyday spoken or written communication. The examples that follow are given in italics , where the specific adverb(ial) in focus is also underlined: They listened attentively . Frequent reference is made to three state‐of‐the‐art grammars of contemporary English: Quirk et al. (1985); Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, and Finegan (1999); and Huddleston and Pullum (2002), and Hasselgård's (2010) major, up‐to‐date study on adverbials. The language examples used are mostly based on and derive from language corpora, particularly from the British National Corpus (hosted by Brigham Young University) (Davies, 2004) and the Brigham Young University 14 billion‐word iWeb Corpus (Davies, 2018) in order to provide examples that are as authentic as possible, even where these are edited to accord with the encyclopedic purpose of the entry.