Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030109
Authors: Yui Suzukida
Misalignment between second language (L2) self-perception and actual ability is often observed among L2 learners. In order to further understand this phenomenon, the current study investigated how the roles of individual differences (IDs; especially experiential and cognitive IDs) influence the learners’ self-assessment accuracy. To this end, L2 speech samples elicited from 97 Japanese learners of English were analyzed via self-evaluation and expert evaluations. Subsequently, learners’ IDs profiles, including working memory, phonological memory, implicit learning and auditory processing, were linked to (a) the gap between self- and expert evaluation scores and (b) the type of inaccurate self-evaluation (i.e., overconfident vs. underconfident evaluations). The study illustrates the complex relationships between L2 learners’ linguistic knowledge, cognitive abilities, experiential profiles and self-perception.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030107
Authors: Manon Bouyé Christopher Gledhill
The popularisation of legal knowledge is a critical issue for equal access to law and justice. Legal discourse has been justly criticised for its obscure terminology and convoluted phrasing, which notably led to the Plain Language Movement in English-speaking countries. In Canada, the concept of Plain Language has been applied to French since the 1980s due to the official policy of bilingualism, while the concept has only been recently discussed in France. In this paper, we examine the impact of Plain Language rewriting on legal phraseology in French popularisation contexts. The first aim of our study is to see if plain texts published in France contain more traces of legal phraseology than French Canadian texts. Our second objective is to determine if a ‘phraseology of plain language’ can be identified across genres and languages. To do this, we compare two corpora of expert-to-expert legal texts written in French—made up, respectively, of legislative texts published in France and judicial texts published by the Supreme Court of Canada—with two corpora of texts that are claimed to have been written in Plain French Language for a non-expert readership—texts that guide laypersons through legal and administrative processes in France and summaries of decisions by the Supreme Court of Canada. Using n-grams, we extract and discuss the patterns that emerge from the corpora. In particular, our analyses rely on the concept of ‘lexico–grammatical patterns’, defined as the minimal unit of meaningful text made up of recurrent sequences of lexical and grammatical items. We then identify a sample of recurring lexico–grammatical patterns and their discursive functions.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030108
Authors: Eric Alvarez Aliyah Morgenstern
This case study examines overheard speech in a third-generation heritage Spanish Mexican family. It presents Spanish use longitudinally and describes overheard Spanish word use in interaction. Transcribed on CLAN to create a plurilingual corpus, ethnographic video data consisted of 24 h across three sampling periods, yielding nearly 30,000 Spanish, English, and language mixed utterances. Quantitative analyses indicate strong Spanish use in the first sample, before dropping. Qualitative descriptions show the third-generation target-child’s attunement to overheard Spanish, and her agency to use Spanish. Overheard input helps her use Spanish words, influencing her social encounters. This paper examines what we coded as overheard input in heritage language acquisition and socialization research. The language practices of one multigenerational Mexican family in California are explored, accounting for how their language practices in multiparty interaction co-create meaning, and how they help a third-generation child use Spanish words grounded in daily experiences. The findings contribute to the discussion of bilingualism in general and definitions of heritage bilingualism in particular. The results underscore the understudied role of overhead speech produced by a diversity of multigenerational family members and word learning. Participation frameworks are dynamically constructed by all participants as permeable, inclusive, and engage the children’s use of inherited bilingual and bicultural practices, suggesting that heritage bilingualism is not just about abstract grammar.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030106
Authors: Laura Sperl Marta Sofia Nicanço Tomé Helene Kühn Helene Kreysa
The Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM) proposed by Kroll and Stewart has been one of the most influential models of late multilingual language processing. While the model has provided valuable insights into language processing mechanisms, the role of contextual factors for the RHM has not been investigated to date. Such contextual effects could be manifold, including individual speakers’ language profiles (such as age of acquisition, proficiency, and immersion experiences), experimental factors (such as different instruction languages), and environmental factors (such as societal language(s)). Additionally, it also appears promising to investigate the applicability of the RHM to non-native multilingual speakers from diverse backgrounds. To investigate whether some of the mentioned contextual factors affect non-native language processing, we designed three online experiments requiring answers in German and English, but tested speakers whose first language was neither German nor English. They performed a series of translation, picture-naming, and recall tasks based on Kroll and Stewart, as well as providing detailed information on their proficiencies, profiles of language use, and exposure. Experiment 1, conducted with speakers living in Germany, established the paradigm and investigated the role of individual differences in linguistic background. While Experiment 2 focused on the short-term effects of the experimental context by varying whether instructions were provided in German or in English, Experiment 3 examined the longer-term role of the current language environment by comparing individuals living in German-speaking countries with speakers living in societies where neither experimental language is spoken regularly. As in Kroll and Stewart, both the response language and the list type constituted key variables affecting response times and accuracy, known as language asymmetry and category interference. Importantly, the strength of this asymmetry was affected by participants’ immersion experiences, suggesting a certain dynamic development in multilingual language processing. In addition, context also seemed to play a role for experimental performance, especially the language environment examined in Experiment 3. Hence, speakers’ individual linguistic backgrounds and experience with the experimental languages, as well as additional contextual factors, need to be considered when conducting multilingual experiments and drawing conclusions about multilinguistic processing.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030105
Authors: Simone A. Sprenger Sara D. Beck Andrea Weber
This study investigated the processing of lexical elements of idioms in isolation. Using visual word priming, spreading activation for idiomatically related word pairs (e.g., pop–question) was compared to that for semantically related (e.g., answer–question) and unrelated word pairs (e.g., trim–question) in two experiments varying in SOA (500 ms and 350 ms). In line with hybrid theories of idiom representation and processing, facilitatory priming was found in both experiments for idiomatic primes, suggesting a tight link between the words of an idiom that is mediated by a common idiom representation. While idiomatic priming was stable across SOAs, semantic priming was stronger for the short SOA, implying fast and early activation. In conclusion, one lexical element of an idiom can facilitate the processing of another, even if the elements are not presented within a phrasal context (i.e., within an idiom), and without the words being semantically related. We discuss our findings in light of theories about idiom processing, as well as current findings in the field of semantic priming.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030104
Authors: Jinsil Jang
This qualitative case study reports the impact of schooling on migrant children’s language socialization, particularly focusing on the role of language ideologies and practices within Korean schools. Despite an increasing population of migrant multilingual children in Korean schools, the education system predominantly follows a monolingual orientation with Korean as the primary medium of instruction. The research aims to address this gap by investigating the influence of Korean teachers’ and emergent multilingual youths’ language ideologies on bi- and multilingual language education. Additionally, this study explores how emerging multilingual children comply with or exhibit ambivalence/resistance toward instructed practices. Data were collected over three years from a regional middle school in South Korea and inductively analyzed using constant comparative methods. The findings underscore the significance of creating a multilingual space in classrooms where teachers value diverse linguistic and other semiotic resources, fostering more active engagement and negotiation of meaning among multilingual students. In contrast, monolingual-oriented classrooms result in the students’ passive behavior and hinder socialization into the Korean school environment. This study advocates for a more inclusive learning environment that recognizes and embraces multilingual values, facilitating meaningful language practices among emerging multilingual youth.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030103
Authors: Juan José Garrido-Pozú
The present study investigated whether L1 and L2 Spanish speakers show sensitivity to matching/mismatching syllable structure and consonant sonority in lexical segmentation in Spanish. A total of 81 English–Spanish learners and 72 Spanish–English learners completed a fragment-monitoring task. They listened to lists of Spanish words as they saw a CV or CVC syllable (e.g., “pa” or “pal”) and pressed a button when the word began with the syllable shown on the screen. The task manipulated syllable structure (CV or CVC) and consonant sonority (fricative, nasal, or liquid) of target syllables and carrier words. Target syllables either matched or did not match the structure of the first syllable in target carrier words (e.g., “pa—pa.lo.ma”; “pa—pal.me.ra”). The results showed that consonant sonority modulated sensitivity to syllable structure in both groups of participants. Spanish–English learners responded faster to matching syllable structure in words that had a fricative or a nasal as the second consonant, and English–Spanish learners responded faster only with a fricative consonant. Higher L2 Spanish proficiency correlated with faster target-syllable identification, but sensitivity to matching/mismatching structure did not vary as a function of proficiency. The study highlights the influence of phonetic factors in the development of L2 lexical segmentation routines.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030100
Authors: Naomi Nagy Julia Petrosov
Russian’s six cases and multiple noun classes make case marking potentially challenging ground for heritage speakers. Indeed, morphological levelling, “probably the best-described feature of language loss”, has been substantiated. One study from 2006 showed that Heritage Russian speakers in the USA produced canonical or prescribed markers for only 13% of preposition+nominal sequences. Conversely, another study from 2020 found that Heritage Russian speakers in Toronto produce a 94% canonical case marker rate in conversational speech. To explore the effects of methodological differences across several studies, the current paper circumscribes the context to preposition+nominal sequences in Heritage Russian speech from the same Toronto corpus as used by the 2020 study but mirroring the domain investigated by Polinsky and including a Homeland comparison to consider changes in both the rates of use of canonical case marking and distributional patterns of non-canonical use. Regression models show more canonical case marking in more frequent words, an independent effect of slightly more mismatch by later generations, but less morphological levelling than reported by Polinsky. Lexicon size does not predict case marking rates as strongly as language usage patterns do, but generation, since immigration, is the best-fitting social predictor. We confirm (small) rate changes in Heritage (vs. Homeland) Russian canonical case marking but not in patterns of levelling.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030102
Authors: Zachary Dukic Chris C. Palmer
Ecological models of competition have provided great explanatory power regarding synonymy in derivational morphology. Competition models of this type have certainly shown their utility, as they have demonstrated, among other things, the relevance of frequency measures, productivity, compositionality and analyzability when comparing the development of morphological constructions. There has been less consideration of alternative models that could be used to describe the historical co-development of suffixes that produce words with sometimes similar forms or meanings but are not inevitably or solely in competition. The symbiotic model proposed in this article may help answer larger questions in linguistics, such as how best to analyze certain multilingual morphological phenomena, including the emergence of semantically similar forms within the same language. The present study demonstrates the importance of a diachronic approach in situations of near-synonymy, as an understanding of semantic similarity necessitates a review of the available historical record. In particular, our study focuses on the case of the suffix -eer (e.g., marketeer) in English, analyzing its origins, semantics, compositionality, and historical development, including its symbiotic relationship to the similar suffix -er (e.g., marketer).
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030101
Authors: Vicente Iranzo
A rich tradition of studies on languages with differential object marking (DOM) is available in the literature. Languages like Spanish or Romanian are frequently cited in discussions about DOM, but Valencian is seldom mentioned in this context. This oversight may stem from a lack of familiarity with the Valencian language and an over-reliance on guidelines set by textbooks and official prescriptive grammars—in the case of Valencian, by the Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua—which drafts the linguistic regulations of the Valencian language. This study aimed to analyze the usage of the DOM in Valencian and explore the social variables that help explain this usage (sex, age, and education). To achieve this goal, Spanish–Valencian bilingual participants completed an oral production task to evaluate their use of DOM in Valencian. Statistical analysis revealed that Valencian is a DOM language that marks direct objects that refer to humans and definite entities. These results point to the linguistic ideologies in Valencia that attempt to artificially create linguistic differentiation between Valencian and Spanish, the co-official languages in the region. Furthermore, the results emphasize the limitations of top-down prescriptive policies in modifying vernacular linguistic varieties.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030098
Authors: Cíntia Pacheco Ana Carvalho Marta Pereira Scherre
This study shows that the incorporation of the first-person plural pronoun a gente has not only reached the southernmost tip of the Brazilian territory, but has crossed the border and entered Uruguayan Portuguese, or varieties of Portuguese spoken in northern Uruguay by Portuguese–Spanish bilinguals. This finding is based on the quantification of the a gente/nós variable in sociolinguistic interviews carried out in two border communities: Aceguá, Brazil, and Aceguá, Uruguay. The analysis of interviews recorded on each side of the border yielded a total of 1000 tokens that were submitted to a multivariate analysis. Following the premises of comparative sociolinguistics, we compared the distribution of the variable on both sides of the border and found that although Uruguayans used a gente less often than Brazilians, this innovation, preferred by young speakers, is incorporated in both dialects, following similar linguistic paths. These results show that Uruguayan Portuguese has incorporated the pronominal a gente in its grammar in a clear sign of convergence towards Brazilian Portuguese and divergence from Spanish, despite the coexistence with Spanish that categorically uses nosotros as the first-person plural pronoun and reserves the cognate la gente for its purely lexical meaning ‘the people’.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030099
Authors: Felicity Cox Joshua Penney Sallyanne Palethorpe
Most analyses of monophthong change have historically relied on static acoustic measures. It is unclear the extent to which dynamic measures can shed greater light on monophthong change than can already be captured using such static approaches. In this study, we conducted a real-time trend analysis of vowels in corpora collected from female Mainstream Australian English (MAusE) speakers under 30 years of age across three time periods: the 1960s, 1990s, and 2010s. Using three different methods for characterising the first and second formants (the target-based approach, discrete cosine transform (DCT), and generalised additive mixed model (GAMM)), we statistically examined differences for each of 10 monophthongs to outline change over the fifty-year period. Results show that all three methods complement each other in capturing the changing vowel system, with the DCT and GAMM analyses superior in their ability to provide greater nuanced detail that would be overlooked without consideration of dynamicity. However, if consideration of the vowel system as a whole is of interest (i.e., the relationships between the vowels), visualising the vowel space can facilitate interpretation, and this may require reference to static measures. We also acknowledge that locating the source of vowel dynamic differences in sound change involves reference to surrounding phonetic context.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030097
Authors: Beatriz Méndez-Guerrero Laura Camargo-Fernández
Human communication is a multimodal phenomenon that involves the combined use of verbal and non-verbal signs. It is estimated that non-verbal signs, especially paralinguistic and kinesic ones, have a significant impact on message production. Silence in Spanish has been described as a plurifunctional communicative resource whose meanings vary depending on contextual, social, and cultural factors. The pragmatic and sociolinguistic nature of this phenomenon calls for examining each case considering the context, the social variables, and the relationship between participants. The aim of this study is to determine the use of silence in Spanish by young women. To achieve this, a corpus of 9 h of spontaneous conversations among six young Spanish university women (1.5 h per participant) was analyzed. The analysis has allowed identifying, first, a series of communicative functions of silence produced by the participants. A relationship between the duration of silence and its communicative function has also been established. Finally, differences in the use of silence by the participants have been found, determined by the interlocutor (male/female), which confirms that women use silence as a basic interactive strategy differently when talking with women and when they do so with men.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030095
Authors: Tomara Gotkova Francesca Ingrosso Polina Mikhel Alain Polguère
This paper addresses the crucial question of the structuring of scientific Notions for the purpose of their proper teaching/acquisition. It aims to demonstrate that non-taxonomic structures, derived from the systematic lexicographic definition of terminological lexical units, can be rigorously constructed and are adequate for implementing a non-isolationist approach to terminology modeling: one that embeds the description of terminological units within a more global model of the general lexicon. Using theoretical and descriptive principles of Explanatory Combinatorial Lexicology and the lexicography of lexical networks known as Lexical Systems, we apply our approach to the core terminology of chemistry and chemistry-related environmental terminology. This allows us to propose Notion building road maps for three languages—English, French and Russian—that can be used as guides for the teaching/acquisition of chemistry Notions. Additionally, exploiting the special case of the noun carbon—which pertains to chemistry, environmental science and, even, general language—we demonstrate the potential of our non-isolationist approach for interfacing distinct sectors of terminological knowledge.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030096
Authors: Zia Tajeddin Neda Khanlarzadeh
As one of the productive approaches to L2 pragmatic development, study abroad (SA) has drawn the attention of numerous researchers during the past few decades. Different factors, specifically those related to L2 learners, implicate the impact of SA on pragmatic development. The present systematic review aims to identify the roles of individual differences, including personal as well as social and cognitive variables, on the pragmatic development of L2 learners who were involved in SA programs. To this end, 39 studies from peer-reviewed journals and books published from 2000 to 2022 were scrutinized. The results revealed that a substantial amount of research has been conducted on the intersection of L2 pragmatic competence and SA. However, more studies are required to investigate the impact of learner variables on different aspects of L2 pragmatics in the SA context. The results also indicated the extent to which learner variables were analyzed in these studies and how each variable impacted the effectiveness of SA programs. In addition to the effects of learner variables, the methodological features of the studies, including the context of the studies, designs of the studies, data sources, and characteristics of the involved participants, were explored and reported. The findings contribute to the fields of L2 pragmatic acquisition and study abroad by highlighting the gaps in the literature and identifying key learner variables that can have drastic influences on learners’ outcomes.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030094
Authors: Diana Santos
The fact that there are (at least) two different translations of the English preposition for used to describe duration in Portuguese, namely durante and por, shows that duration is an interesting area in the tense and aspect panorama of this language, which deserves close study. In this paper, I present an empirical study based on four different corpora to investigate the matter, looking at the Portuguese varieties from Brazil and Portugal and different text genres (general and specialised newspapers, oral interviews, and fiction). The material spans circa two centuries. This paper identifies some specific uses and preferences of the two adverbials and confirms and challenges other claims in the linguistic literature. It shows that narrative fiction is definitely different from newspaper text due to its need to describe short duration and that planned duration can be expressed using both kinds of adverbials.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030093
Authors: Adam James Ross Tallman
As with all Pano languages, Chácobo links clauses together through an elaborate system of switch reference clauses. This paper provides a detailed description of switch reference and clause linkage in Chácobo (Pano) from a typological perspective. While previous work on Chácobo and Pano languages in general describes such clause-linkage strategies as involving subordination, no work has provided a detailed description of the diagnostics for classifying clause-linkage types with clause-linkage strategies in Pano. If these variables are relied on, nearly all clause-linkage strategies in Chácobo fall outside of typical coordination and subordinate patterns. There is also little reason to adopt such a distinction on language-internal grounds.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030092
Authors: M. Antonia Fornés Pallicer Mercè Puig Rodríguez-Escalona
This article analyses the communicative power of eyebrows in ancient Rome within the framework of broader research into gestures from the same period. Our research uses the corpus of Latin literature to describe evidence of gestures in said texts. It then identifies the expressions used by the authors to refer to them and describes how they were performed. Moreover, by analysing the context, it explains the meanings the authors attribute to them. Although the texts do not describe these gestures with the precision required by non-verbal communication research today, our analysis of the selected extracts has enabled us to identify four free eyebrow gestures—contracting, raising, relaxing, and lowering—and associate a meaning to them. In this regard, we have uncovered that Roman writers introduce eyebrow gestures in their work to communicate emotions such as arrogance and humility, and anger or seriousness, and even to identify certain characters. In turn, these gestures are also used to express disapproval and assent in place of speech.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030091
Authors: Alexandra Bagasheva
Against the background of comparatively insufficient, expressly dedicated studies on double particle verb person nominalisations, this paper offers a qualitative, cognitive-constructionist approach to the properties of doubler-upper nominalisations of particle verbs in English and a reappraisal of some of the available analyses thereof. On the assumption of the validity of the flexicon stance on the organisation of words in the human mind, and on the basis of a preliminary semantic analysis of 300 types of doubler-upper nouns extracted from two corpora and Urban Dictionary, it is claimed that there are no identifiable constraints on the possibility of double-er marking over any of the positionally specified single markings and no particular properties of particle verbs as bases to preclude double -er marking. A hypothesis is formulated that, despite their deviance, doubler-uppers strike the optimal balance between complexity and unity and appear to be the most natural and morphophonologically best-fitting pattern for particle verb -er nominalisation (at least in spoken discourse and the media).
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030090
Authors: Piero Visconte Sandro Sessarego Rajiv Rao
This paper applies the Autosegmental Metrical (AM) model of intonation phonology and the Spanish Tones and Break Indices (Sp_ToBI) annotation conventions to compare the intonational contours of declarative sentences in two varieties of Puerto Rican Spanish: (1) San Juan Spanish, spoken in the capital city of San Juan, and (2) Loíza Spanish, an Afro-Hispanic vernacular spoken in Loíza. The geographical proximity between these two municipalities entails constant contact within a shared linguistic space. However, speakers from San Juan perceive Loíza as a municipality that has its own peculiar way of speaking. The acoustic and phonological analysis was carried out with PRAAT to verify whether pitch accents coincide in the spontaneous speech of the two analyzed varieties. The data we examined contain an overall predominance of the bitonal pitch accents L*+H and L+<H* in San Juan Spanish, and L+H* in Loíza Spanish. Findings show both similarities and differences within the two speech communities, as well as with intonational patterns in other (Afro-)Hispanic varieties. These results provide new information on spontaneous declarative intonation in (Afro-)Puerto Rican Spanish by offering a new perspective on the origin of a set of the prosodic phenomena found in these two varieties.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030089
Authors: Chiara Barbero Raquel Amaro
Specialized languages can activate different sets of semantic features when compared to general language or express concepts through different words according to the domain. The specialized lexicon, i.e., lexical units that denote more specific concepts and knowledge emerging from specific domains, however, co-exists with the common lexicon, i.e., the set of lexical units that denote concepts and knowledge shared by the average speakers, regardless of their specific training or expertise. Communication between specialists and non-specialists can show a big gap between language(s), and therefore lexical units, used by the two groups. However, quite often, semantic and conceptual overlapping between specialized and common lexical units occurs and, in many cases, the specialized and common units refer to close concepts or even point to the same reality. Considering the modeling of meaning in functional lexical resources, this paper puts forth a solution that links common and specialized lexica within the WordNet model framework. We propose a new relation expressing semantic proximity between common and specialized units and define the conditions for its establishment. Besides contributing to the observation and understanding of the process of knowledge specialization and its reflex on the lexicon, the proposed relation allows for the integration of specialized and non-specialized lexicons into a single database, contributing directly to improving communication in specialist/non-specialist contexts, such as teaching–learning situations or health professional-patient interactions, among many others, where code-switching is frequent and necessary.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030088
Authors: Maria Koliopoulou Jim Walker
There has been a recent focus in studies of English morphology on the concept of extravagance as applied to word formation, and on the interplay between extravagance and creativity. This article examines this issue, taking as a test case the phenomenon of double suffixation of phrasal verbs. While double-ER suffixation (fixer-upper, helper-outer) has attracted substantial interest in the literature, less has been said about other suffixes. This article provides data that demonstrate that double suffixation occurs with -ERY, -AGE, -EE and -ABLE suffixes. As such, double suffixation can be seen as a genuine word formation template, rather than a phenomenon restricted to a single suffix. Furthermore, examination of the data enables a reflection on the interactions between the concepts of productivity, creativity and extravagance. We propose to see these concepts not just as three overlapping notions, but rather as points on a creativity scale. To underscore the parallels between them, we propose to see them successively as F-creativity, E-creativity and X-creativity.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030087
Authors: Fenqi Wang Delin Deng Kevin Tang Ratree Wayland
The relative weighting of f0 and vowel reduction in English spoken word recognition at the sentence level were investigated in one two-alternative forced-choice word identification experiment. In the experiment, an H* pitch-accented or a deaccented word fragment (e.g., AR- in the word archive) was presented at the end of a carrier sentence for identification. The results of the experiment revealed differences in the cue weighting of English lexical stress perception between native and non-native listeners. For native English listeners, vowel quality was a more prominent cue than f0, while native Mandarin Chinese listeners employed both vowel quality and f0 in a comparable fashion. These results suggested that (a) vowel reduction is superior to f0 in signaling initial stress in the words and (b) f0 facilitates the recognition of word initial stress, which is modulated by first language.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030086
Authors: Ana Elvira Ojanguren López
The aim of this article is to explain the syntactic competition found in the complementation of Old English Prevent verbs. The competition on argumenthood involves linked verbal predications and linked nominal predications. Evidence is gathered for continuity both between finite and non-finite linked verbal predications as well as between non-finite and nominalised linked predications. This evidence points to a diachronic development: finite clause > non-finite clause > nominalisation. The main conclusion of the article is that the Interclausal Relation Hierarchy predicts the replacement of the finite clause complementation with non-finite clause complementation in such a way that the syntactically tighter noun phrase involving a deverbal nominalisation constitutes the next step of syntactic development.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030085
Authors: Kajsa Gullberg Victoria Johansson Roger Johansson
This study aims to establish a methodological framework for investigating deception in both spoken and written language production. A foundational premise is that the production of deceitful narratives induces a heightened cognitive load that has a discernable influence on linguistic processes during real-time language production. This study includes meticulous analysis of spoken and written data from two participants who told truthful and deceitful narratives. Spoken processes were captured through audio recordings and subsequently transcribed, while written processes were recorded using keystroke logging, resulting in final texts and corresponding linear representations of the writing activity. By grounding our study in a linguistic approach for understanding cognitive load indicators in language production, we demonstrate how linguistic processes, such as text length, pauses, fluency, revisions, repetitions, and reformulations can be used to capture instances of deception in both speaking and writing. Additionally, our findings underscore that markers of cognitive load are likely to be more discernible and more automatically measured in the written modality. This suggests that the collection and examination of writing processes have substantial potential for forensic applications. By highlighting the efficacy of analyzing both spoken and written modalities, this study provides a versatile methodological framework for studying deception during language production, which significantly enriches the existing forensic toolkit.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030084
Authors: Arianne Reimerink Pilar León-Araúz Melania Cabezas-García
Despite its importance, environmental law has largely been ignored in environmental knowledge bases. This may be due to the fact that legal issues may not, strictly speaking, be considered scientific knowledge in environmental knowledge resources, which may in turn relate to the complexity of reflecting the cultural component (which includes different legal systems) in the description of terms and concepts. The terminological knowledge base EcoLexicon has recently begun to include information on environmental law. This paper takes the methodological perspective of frame-based terminology to analyze typical verb collocations in environmental law that will be added to the phraseology module of EcoLexicon. Corpus analysis was used to compare the behavior of verbs collocating with pollution in environmental science and environmental law. Verbs were classified based on lexical domains and semantic classes through definition factorization, as described in the Lexical Grammar Model. The differences were mostly based on the specificity of the arguments and the emphasis on the polluter in environmental law. This resulted in a proposal for the inclusion and configuration of environmental law phraseology in EcoLexicon, showing sociocultural differences across environmental subdomains.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030083
Authors: Tjerk Hagemeijer Rita Gonçalves Nélia Alexandre
This paper investigates the formation of spatial locative relativization in three African varieties of Portuguese. While research on relative constructions in Portuguese has deserved considerable attention in the literature, it tends to focus on the European and Brazilian varieties, with locative relativization being only marginally addressed. Using data extracted from spoken corpora of contemporary, urban varieties of Angolan, Mozambican, and Santomean Portuguese, we aim to discuss whether there is a correlation between syntactic and semantic variables and the selection of the two main locative relative morphemes, onde ‘where’ and que ‘that’. Overall, the three varieties at stake behave similarly with respect to the analyzed syntactic variables and follow the tendency found in Portuguese varieties toward the use of pied-piping and P-chopping as the dominant relativization mechanisms, independent of the syntactic relation between the antecedent and the relative clause. Semantically, we identified some fine-grained differences between the three varieties, with Santomean Portuguese generally being the outlier or one of the outliers. Crucially, definiteness of the head noun stands out as the one variable that plays a major role in the selection of the relative morpheme: [−definite] head nouns show a proportionally higher preference for que in both AP and STP, which is particularly visible with bare nouns in the latter. This motivates the hypothesis that less specified head nouns show a preference for the un(der)specified relative morpheme que. We further show that the role of language contact is at best very limited.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030082
Authors: Camila Lívio Chad Howe
This study describes processes of language change in Angolan Portuguese focusing on the use of intensifiers. Previous studies have shown that intensifiers are a relevant category for the study of language change due to their rapid change and variable meaning. It has been noted that intensifiers are particularly prone to renewal, suggesting speakers’ desire to innovate. Informed by a Digital Humanities approach, we collect and analyze data from Twitter (now X), focusing on the multi-functional intensifier bué, ‘very’, in Angolan Portuguese (AP). In this paper, we (1) provide an overview of the word’s distribution in AP, (2) consider the processes of change involved in bué’s variation, and (3) discuss the role of linguistic borrowing in language change and grammaticalization, shedding light on some of the cultural aspects that play a role in this word’s development, such as the influence of the media and the contact situation between Angolan and European Portuguese.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030081
Authors: Loryn Isaacs Alex Odlum Pilar León-Araúz
Quantitative data visualization is an important element of corpus linguistics, and visualization tools are commonly available in corpus management systems (CMSs) or developed for custom tasks. Nonetheless, the implementation and advancement of visualization methods can be a challenge, both for individual projects and collectively. This article introduces a web application template that integrates with the Sketch Engine application programming interface (API) to encourage the development of new visualization tools that can provide advanced visualization features while directly communicating with the CMS. The application template, written in Python and called Quartz, is described and implemented for the Humanitarian Encyclopedia as part of ongoing efforts to conduct analyses of humanitarian concepts. The application’s features, purpose, and limitations are described, and an example case study utilizing the software is offered, focusing on usage patterns of the concept localization in the humanitarian domain. Some of the challenges of improving visualization techniques for corpus-based analysis are discussed, including data interoperability and the role of visualization in data exploration.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030080
Authors: Martina Cangelosi Claudia Borghetti Paola Bonifacci
The growing field of family language policies (FLPs), defined as overt and explicit planning in relation to language use among family members, has garnered increasing interest. FLPs influence child–caretaker interactions and are closely linked to child language development and acquisition. This study investigates the impact of FLPs on children’s proficiency in their heritage language (HL). Employing a multi-method approach, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 53 multilingual parents to explore their beliefs, ideologies, and language management within the family context. Concurrently, their children were administered standardized tasks in their heritage language (HL) to assess receptive vocabulary skills and morphosyntactic comprehension. Our findings indicate that parents’ perceived value of the HL significantly correlates with their children’s language performance, going beyond the influence of reported domestic language usage.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030079
Authors: Joshua Penney Anita Szakay
Despite well-established Pasifika communities in Australia, there has been no examination of the English spoken by members of these communities in the sociolinguistic literature. Yet, research shows that Pasifika English may exhibit key differences from local ‘mainstream’ varieties. In this paper, we present a case study of members of a drill rap group with Pasifika heritage to examine whether Pasifika English features are evident in their speech. We first analyze their monophthong productions and compare these to those of mainstream Australian English speakers. We also analyze their dental fricative realizations to examine whether there is evidence of th-stopping and dh-stopping, commonly described as markers of Pasifika English. Finally, we investigate whether their speech is more syllable-timed than mainstream Australian English. The results show that these speakers produce monophthongs generally consistent with mainstream Australian English vowels, despite some small differences. We also show consistent th-fronting and dh-stopping in their speech, which serves as a marker of their Pasifika heritage. We find a tendency towards more syllable-timed speech; however, this occurs to a lesser extent than has been reported for other Pasifika varieties of English. The results suggest that these speakers index their Pasifika identities by employing indicators/markers of Pasifika English that diverge from mainstream Australian English.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030078
Authors: Sylvain Coulange Tsuneo Kato Solange Rossato Monica Masperi
This research paper addresses the challenge of providing effective feedback on spontaneous speech produced by second language (L2) English learners. As the position of pauses and lexical stress is often considered a determinative factor for easy comprehension by listeners, an automated pipeline is introduced to analyze the position of pauses in speech, the lexical stress patterns of polysyllabic content words, and the degree of prosodic contrast between stressed and unstressed syllables, on the basis of F0, intensity, and duration measures. The pipeline is applied to 11 h of spontaneous speech from 176 French students with B1 and B2 proficiency levels. It appeared that B1 students make more pauses within phrases and less pauses between clauses than B2 speakers, with a large diversity among speakers at both proficiency levels. Overall, lexical stress is correctly placed in only 35.4% of instances, with B2 students achieving a significantly higher score (36%) than B1 students (29.6%). However, great variation among speakers is also observed, ranging from 0% to 68% in stress position accuracy. Stress typically falls on the last syllable regardless of the prosodic expectations, with the strong influence of syllable duration. Only proficient speakers show substantial F0 and intensity contrasts.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030077
Authors: Asmaa Shehata
This study investigates the effects of gender and the learning context on learners’ perceptions of Arabic consonant contrasts. To this end, 60 intermediate Arabic learners, half of which were males and half of which were females, were recruited from two different learning contexts: a study-abroad (SA) program in Egypt and an at-home (AH) setting at a western American university. Learners in the two groups were tested before and after a semester of Arabic study using a perception task that involved distinguishing four Arabic consonant contrasts: /d - dˁ/, /h - ħ/, /s - sˁ/, and /t - tˁ/). The results reveal that the advantage of females in segmental identification accuracy was not verified, as female performance did not significantly differ from male performance in any of the four target consonant contrasts. In contrast, the learning context was found to positively impact learners’ perceptions of the target Arabic consonants, as the SA group significantly outperformed their counterparts in the AH environment on the /h - ħ/ and /d - dˁ/ contrasts. However, there were no significant differences between learners in the two different contexts regarding the two other consonant contrasts (i.e., /s - sˁ/ and /t - tˁ/). The findings bring insights into the understanding of the gender-based differences in identifying problematic Arabic consonantal contrasts for English learners in two different contexts of learning, and they shed light on the implications for language pedagogy for pronunciation training.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030076
Authors: Javier Martín Arista
This article deals with one of the aspects involved in the compilation of a treebank of Old English within the framework of Universal Dependencies. More specifically, this study addresses the question of how to account for the remarkable degree of Old English morphological relatedness in a type of treebank designed to stress syntactic similarities across languages. The solution proposed and assessed in this study is the addition of an extra field of annotation for morphological relatedness. The data of this analysis comprise 1106 derivatives attaching the prefix un-. Out of these, there are around 80 morphologically complex nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs whose derivation cannot be described gradually, 33 of which are unique formations or hapax legomena according to the attestations provided by the Dictionary of Old English Corpus. The main conclusion is that the specification of short-distance and long-distance morphological relatedness provides the Old English treebank with a paradigmatic dimension that can be particularly relevant for languages with relatively generalised and transparent derivational morphology.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030075
Authors: Jeanine Treffers-Daller
One year into the job as Editor-in-Chief of Languages, I am delighted to report that the journal has received its first Journal Impact Factor (0 [...]
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030074
Authors: Andrea Pizarro Pedraza Ferran Suñer Barbara De Cock
Streaming platforms have transformed series distribution and accessibility, with Spanish-language shows gaining immense popularity, notably “La casa de papel” (Money Heist). This series features a diverse cast of characters whose linguistic diversity extends to the use of taboo language. Previous studies have shown that linguistic immersion, such as staying abroad, significantly impacts knowledge of this kind of language. This paper aims to explore to what extent these and other individual differences affect the comprehension of swear words in TV series. To this end, 33 learners of Spanish at B2 level were asked to translate 14 taboo expressions from the series. They also completed a questionnaire on the exposure to authentic language use through extended stays abroad and TV series as well as their attitudes towards the use of taboo words. The results show that students’ positive attitudes towards taboo expressions and their multilingual status were associated with significantly better comprehension of taboo expressions. Furthermore, students with stay-abroad experience, watching the series in Spanish (with or without captions) and with higher proficiency levels in Spanish were found to perform better on the comprehension test, although no significant effects were found. Pedagogical implications and further directions for research are discussed in light of these findings.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030073
Authors: Varvara Kuz Fangzhou Cai Keyue Chen Jiaxin Chen Xuzi Qi Clement Veall Yuanqi Zheng Zhengping Xu Andrea Santi
Garden-path sentences generate processing difficulty due to a more preferred parse conflicting with incoming parsing information. A domain-general cognitive control mechanism has been argued to help identify and resolve these parsing conflicts. This cognitive control mechanism has been argued to underlie adaptation to garden path processing at the trial level (conflict adaptation) and contiguously over the experiment (syntactic adaptation) in independent literature. The strongest evidence for its domain generality comes from garden-path processing being facilitated when preceded by a non-syntactic conflict (e.g., Stroop). This has been reliably observed in the visual world paradigm, which, like Stroop, requires irrelevant visual information to be suppressed. We tested the domain generality of conflict adaptation and its relationship to contiguous syntactic adaptation across four experiments (n = 562). To eliminate the visual object confound, the Stroop task was followed by a sentence-reading task. We observed Stroop and ambiguity effects, but no conflict adaptation in each experiment. Contiguous syntactic adaptation was replicated and most compatible with the parser changing its expectations and/or improving revision. While the data largely fail to support a domain-general cognitive control mechanism, a language-specific one could operate in both trial and contiguous syntactic adaptation and is worth future exploration.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030072
Authors: Rubén Pérez-Ramón
Second-language learners often encounter communication challenges due to a foreign accent (FA) in their speech, influenced by their native language (L1). This FA can affect rhythm, intonation, stress, and the segmental domain, which consists of individual language sounds. This study looks into the segmental FA aspect, exploring listeners’ perceptions when Spanish interacts with English. Utilizing the SIAEW corpus, which replaces segments of English words with anticipated Spanish-accented realizations, we assess the ability of non-native listeners to discriminate degrees of accent across male and female voices. This research aims to determine the impact of voice consistency on detecting accentedness variations, studying participants from Japanese and Spanish. Results show that, while listeners are generally able to discriminate degrees of foreign accent across speakers, some segmental transformations convey a more clear distinction depending on the phonological representations of the native and accented realisations on the listener’s system. Another finding is that listeners tend to better discriminate degrees of accent when words are more native-like sounding.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030071
Authors: Malgorzata Anna Ulasik Aleksandra Miletić
Sentences are generally understood to be essential communicative units in writing that are built to express thoughts and meanings. Studying sentence production provides a valuable opportunity to shed new light on the writing process itself and on the underlying cognitive processes. Nevertheless, research on the production of sentences in writing remains scarce. We propose a theoretical framework and an open-source implementation that aim to facilitate the study of sentence production based on keystroke logs. We centre our approach around the notion of sentence history: all the versions of a given sentence during the production of a text. The implementation takes keystroke logs as input and extracts sentence versions, aggregates them into sentence histories and evaluates the sentencehood of each sentence version. We provide detailed evaluation of the implementation based on a manually annotated corpus of texts in French, German and English. The implementation yields strong results on the three processing aspects.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030070
Authors: Claudia Duarte-Borquez Maxine Van Doren Marc Garellek
We investigate utterance-final voice quality in bilinguals of English and Spanish, two languages which differ in the type of non-modal voice usually encountered at ends of utterances: American English often has phrase-final creak, whereas in Mexican Spanish, phrase-final voiced sounds are breathy or even devoiced. Twenty-one bilinguals from the San Diego-Tijuana border region were recorded (with electroglottography and audio) reading passages in English and Spanish. Ends of utterances were coded for their visual voice quality as “modal” (having no aspiration noise or voicing irregularity), “breathy” (having aspiration noise), “creaky” (having voicing irregularity), or “breathy-creaky” (having both aspiration noise and voicing irregularity). In utterance-final position, speakers showed more frequent use of both modal and creaky voice when speaking in English, and more frequent use of breathy and breathy-creaky voice when speaking in Spanish. We find no role of language dominance on the rates of these four voice qualities. The electroglottographic and acoustic analyses show that all voice qualities, even utterance-final creak, are produced with increased glottal spreading; the combination of distinct noise measures and amplitude of voicing can distinguish breathy, creaky, and breathy-creaky voice qualities from one another, and from modal voice.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030069
Authors: Marie Périni Adrien Dadone Brigitte Garcia
This article addresses the issue of access to the written word for deaf people whose main language is sign language. We question the status of sentence processing in the acquisition of a written language by deaf people, visual beings par excellence. This written language is both the written form of another language (namely a vocal language) and another modality, that of writing (as opposed to the oral form of language i.e., the face-to-face form of language), which they have not experienced in their own, non-written language. We highlight two points in the literature that we feel are crucial to addressing this issue: first, the significant linguistic distance between their L1 (SL) and their L2 (written vocal language), which severely limits the possibility of positive transfer from one to the other; and secondly, the evidence of a cognitive functioning specific to deaf people, marked in particular by higher processing capacities in the visual domain. Based on the results of two studies on the written output of deaf people, we suggest that particularities in the acquisition of the sentence are closely linked both to the structure of SL and to the visual functioning of this population. Finally, we emphasize the importance of using sign language as a metalanguage in teaching writing to deaf signers.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030068
Authors: Nicola Cirillo
Automatic term extraction aims at extracting terminological units from specialized corpora to assist terminographers in developing glossaries, thesauri, and termbases. Unfortunately, traditional methods often overlook the complex relation between terminologies of different subject fields that co-occur in a single specialized corpus. This study illustrates Domain Concept Relatedness, a novel term extraction technique meant to isolate the terminology of a given subject field. We test our technique against the term extraction tool of Sketch Engine and the contrastive approach by applying them to the extraction of waste management terms from a new Italian corpus about waste management legislation. The results show that Domain Concept Relatedness effectively extracts multi-word terms belonging to a given subject field but still fails to extract single-word terms.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9030067
Authors: Daniela Isac
In this paper I propose that the host of the definite suffix in Daco-Romanian languages like Modern Romanian, Old Romanian, Megleno-Romanian, Istro-Romanian, and Aromanian (DacRom) is determined at PF, as a consequence of the conditions that apply to the Spell-Out of chains. The relevant chains are the result of an Agree relation obtained between the [def] feature of the D head and a matching feature of other heads within the DP, such as N and A. I propose that Agree chains are subject to restrictions that are similar to those affecting movement chains, so no new mechanisms need to be posited in order to account for the overt realization of the suffixal definite article in DacRom.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020066
Authors: Katie Beatrice Howard Jenny L. Gibson Napoleon Katsos
An increasing body of research suggests that bilingualism is possible and perhaps even advantageous for autistic individuals. However, several factors might influence parents’ decisions about raising their autistic child bilingually, including national language policies, educational contexts, advice received from key professionals, and the child’s individual strengths and needs. Accordingly, there is a clear imperative to understand how the views of different stakeholders converge and diverge when language decisions are made in the context of autism. This paper brings new insights by synthesising the findings of three qualitative studies that used interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to explore the perspectives and experiences of bilingual autistic children (n = 11), parents (n = 16), and educational practitioners (n = 13) of bilingualism in autism in England and Wales. Despite wide variation between and within groups, a striking tension emerged between individuals’ beliefs about bilingualism in general, which were positive, and their experiences of bilingualism in autism specifically, which often foregrounded more monolingual approaches. This paper examines this tension, with a particular focus on stakeholders’ attitudes towards the feasibility of bilingualism, families’ language choices in the context of autism, and how notions of contextual linguistic diversity accentuated differences between England and Wales. We conclude by arguing that greater awareness of both bilingualism and neurodiversity in educational and clinical settings may improve the experiences of bilingual autistic children and, crucially, the language advice families receive.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020065
Authors: Man Gao
While existing cross-language studies on the perception of non-native tones primarily focus on naïve listeners, this study addresses an obvious gap by investigating learners from diverse language backgrounds. Specifically, it investigates Mandarin tone perception in two groups of learners from Nordic languages, Swedish (a pitch-accent language), and Danish (a non-tonal language), as well as in a group of native Chinese speakers. Analysis of their performance in tone identification task revealed a slight advantage for Swedish learners, implying the influence of their pitch accent background in learning Mandarin tones. However, both Swedish and Danish learners who excelled in the tone identification task exhibited similar perception of within-category tonal variations but differed from native Chinese speakers. Additionally, the study found that the presence of length contrast, a prosodic feature in the learners’ native languages, significantly influences their perception of Mandarin tones.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020064
Authors: Ramona Cătălina Corbeanu Ionuț Geană
This paper focuses on the syntax of interrogative clauses in Istro-Romanian. The aim is to determine the parametric settings for V-to-C, subject placement (SVO or VSO) and the target for constituent movement under discourse triggers. The findings indicate that Istro-Romanian preserved the parametric settings from Old Romanian, especially those that converged with the parametric settings in Croatian grammar. In particular, SVO can be explained only through inheritance, whereas VSO, lack of V-to-C and scrambling are a matter of both inheritance and convergence with Croatian.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020063
Authors: Mariapaola Piccione Maria Francesca Ferin Noemi Furlani Miriam Geiß Theodoros Marinis Tanja Kupisch
This study focuses on the contexts of language experience in relation to language dominance in eighty-seven Italian–German primary school children in Germany using the MAIN narrative task. We compare current language experience in the heritage language (Italian) and the majority language (German) in both formal and informal settings, and we examine the respective impact on micro- and macrostructure measures, including different language domains. Some previous findings emphasized the importance of language experience in formal contexts. By contrast, our results suggest that, in particular, language experience in informal contexts determines vocabulary and fluency in the heritage and majority language, while there are no effects of exposure on syntactic complexity. Furthermore, while the younger children are relatively balanced, the older children are more dominant in the societal language. Our findings imply that the use of the minority language in informal contexts should be encouraged to promote its development and maintenance.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020062
Authors: Daniel Williams Turgut Ağabeyoğlu Adamantios Gafos Paola Escudero
When encountering an unfamiliar accent, a hypothesized perceptual challenge is associating its phonetic realizations with the intended phonemic categories. Greater accumulated exposure to the language might afford richer representations of phonetic variants, thereby increasing the chance of detecting unfamiliar accent speakers’ intended phonemes. The present study examined the extent to which the detection of vowel phonemes spoken in an unfamiliar regional accent of English is facilitated or hindered depending on their acoustic similarity to vowels produced in a familiar accent. Monolinguals, experienced bilinguals and native German second-language (L2) learners completed a phoneme detection task. Based on duration and formant trajectory information, unfamiliar accent speakers’ vowels were classed as acoustically “similar” or “dissimilar” to counterpart phonemes in the familiar accent. All three participant groups were substantially less sensitive to the phonemic identities of “dissimilar” compared to “similar” vowels. Unlike monolinguals and bilinguals, L2 learners showed a response shift for “dissimilar” vowels, reflecting a cautious approach to these items. Monolinguals displayed somewhat heightened sensitivity compared to bilinguals, suggesting that greater accumulated exposure aided phoneme detection for both “similar” and “dissimilar” vowels. Overall, acoustic similarity predicted the relative success of detecting vowel phonemes in cross-dialectal speech perception across groups with varied linguistic backgrounds.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020061
Authors: Miguel García
The present study explores intonational patterns in spontaneous speech in Peruvian Amazonian Spanish (PAS). The data came from 12 monolingual Spanish speakers in the city of Pucallpa, where the Spanish language has historically been in contact with the Amazonian language Shipibo-Konibo. The speakers responded to an open-ended prompt that elicited broad focus declaratives. Acoustic information from 1524 pitch accents was extracted from 194 sentences and analyzed using Praat. The analysis focused on five features: F0 rises, F0 peak alignment, downstepping, final lowering, and cases of stress clash. The results not only supported previous research on this variety that came from read speech tasks (e.g., F0 peaks consistently aligned with the stressed syllable), but also highlighted the importance of using multiple methodologies to gain a more comprehensive understanding of PAS prosody. Specifically, the varied sentence lengths and structures common in spontaneous speech provided new insights into downstepping, final lowering, and stress clash in PAS intonation. Overall, these results contribute to the growing literature on Spanish prosody in shared linguistic spaces and lend support for trends (such as F0 peak alignment) that have been reported in other language contact varieties.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020060
Authors: Simone De Cia Mariangela Cerullo
This paper investigates the syntactic–pragmatic behavior of two expletive-like elements, namely a and chiru, in Fornese and Cilentano, two Romance varieties spoken in Northern and Southern Italy, respectively. We argue that a and chiru are not bona fide expletive subjects but discourse-pragmatic expletives, which mark zero aboutness or the absence of an aboutness referent in an utterance. The investigation of Fornese and Cilentano points towards the existence of a sub-class of null-subject languages where aboutness as a discourse feature must be structurally satisfied by merging an overt or null topic in the syntactic spine of the clause. In the absence of such an element—for example, in thetic clauses—a discourse-pragmatic expletive is externally merged as a last-resort strategy to satisfy [uAboutness]. We argue that, in these null-subject languages, the satisfaction of the discourse feature [uAboutness] is an LF requirement, which is subject to a parametric choice. We show that, in Fornese, “default” [aboutness] is satisfied in SubjP, which is the canonical syntactic position for overt subjects within a cartographic approach. In Cilentano, on the other hand, [aboutness] is satisfied in a higher position within the C-domain, namely ShiftP, the canonical syntactic position that hosts overt aboutness/shift topics.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020059
Authors: Sami Honkasalo
This paper discusses extensive language contact and its results in Kazakhstani Gansu Dungan, a divergent variety of Mandarin Chinese. Based primarily on recorded conversational source materials, this study offers a contact linguistic overview of the language, introducing both phonological and morphosyntactic contact phenomena. It is shown that Kazakhstani Gansu Dungan is currently under extensive Russian influence. The influence permeates all layers of the language and exceeds lexical borrowing mentioned in earlier Dungan studies. For instance, clause combining and complex clauses in Dungan have shifted to the direction of a Russian model, which makes the language stand out among other Sinitic varieties. This study demonstrates that, in addition to introducing new structures, extensive Russian influence on Dungan also reinforces earlier development that has led the language further away from the Sinitic prototype. In all, Kazakhstani Gansu Dungan forms its own kind of divergent Russianized Sinitic variety and thus offers a contribution to both researching language contact in the Russophone world and to understanding the typological diversity of Sinitic languages.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020058
Authors: María Mare
This paper aims to revisit a construction found in some Spanish varieties which refers to a set constituted by a singular referent and an annex introduced by the item con ‘with’: PRO(noun)[PL] with-DP. This construction triggers plural agreement and can be doubled by a plural pronoun, indicating that the annex is included in the set to which verbal agreement and the plural pronoun refer. For example, Nosotros con Juan viajamos ayer (literally, ‘We with Juan travelled.1PL yesterday’) means ‘Juan and I travelled yesterday’. We explore the Spanish PRO[PL] with-DP, taking into account its discursive properties together with the syntactic requirements involved in the agreement patterns. In fact, although the two individuals denoted by this construction are involved as equal participants in the event, they have a different discursive status: one of them introduces new information, while the other refers to the immediate communicative situation. If some notions regarding information structure can be coded by binary features such as [+/−anaphor] and [+/−contrast], it is possible to find plurality triggered by the opposite combination of features within the same syntactic object. PRO[PL] with-DP is a possibility that the lexicons of some languages offer.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020057
Authors: Susana Pérez Castillejo Mónica de la Fuente Iglesias
This paper presents an inventory of pitch accents and boundary tones in Galician Spanish (GS), a variety spoken in Northwestern Spain. Research so far has focused on explaining GS intonation features as transfer phenomena from Galician, the vernacular Romance language in the region. Because of this, previous studies have often included Galician L1 speakers, for whom transfer is expected when speaking Spanish L2. However, GS is the single L1 of half the children in Galicia, and it is spoken almost exclusively by about a quarter of Galicians. Our study focuses on this population and investigates the relative frequency and distribution of tonal units in GS when direct transfer from Galician is unlikely. A corpus of 1706 sentences (statements, questions, imperatives, and vocatives in neutral and biased contexts) was obtained from 28 participants through a discourse completion task. Results showed that patterns previously attributed to direct transfer from Galician L1 (for example, upstepped final accents in neutral declaratives or falling contours in unmarked interrogatives) are widespread in GS as L1. Findings also show commonalities with other L1 Spanish varieties, both in Europe (for example, L* L% as the unmarked declarative ending) and America (for example, the L* + H prenuclear accent of Caribbean varieties).
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020056
Authors: Seyma Inan Aslihan Nisanci Yvette Harris
A dearth of research concerning Turkish immigrant families in the United States exists, prompting this study’s focus. This research aims to illuminate the influence of parental language attitudes among Turkish immigrants on their motivation to foster the preservation of their heritage language (HL) in their children, alongside an exploration of the strategies employed for HL retention. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 parents (16 mothers and 4 fathers), with each interview spanning 15–20 min. The interviews, conducted individually by the primary author in Turkish and later translated into English, unveiled a spectrum of parental language attitudes, impacting their motivation to uphold HL. Variances in motivation were observed, intertwined with factors such as home and community environments, parental acculturation experiences, perceptions regarding the relationship between culture and language, and the perceived advantages of bilingualism for children’s cognitive development and future prospects. Despite differing motivations, all parents expressed a desire to preserve HL, prompting the deployment of diverse Heritage Language Management Strategies (HLMS). This study significantly contributes to the understanding of how parental attitudes shape HL preservation efforts within families, offering insights crucial to the field of HL and family language policy, thereby highlighting implications for practice and further research.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020055
Authors: Emmanuel Ferragne Anne Guyot Talbot Margaux Cecchini Martine Beugnet Emmanuelle Delanoë-Brun Laurianne Georgeton Christophe Stécoli Jean-François Bonastre Corinne Fredouille
People’s perception of forensic evidence is greatly influenced by crime TV series. The analysis of the human voice is no exception. However, unlike fingerprints—with which fiction and popular beliefs draw an incorrect parallel—the human voice varies according to many factors, can be altered deliberately, and its potential uniqueness has yet to be proven. Starting with a cursory examination of landmarks in forensic voice analysis that exemplify how the voiceprint fallacy came about and why people think they can recognize people’s voices, we then provide a thorough inspection of over 100 excerpts from TV series. Through this analysis, we seek to characterize the narrative and aesthetic processes that fashion our perception of scientific evidence when it comes to identifying somebody based on voice analysis. These processes converge to exaggerate the reliability of forensic voice analysis. We complement our examination with plausibility ratings of a subset of excerpts. We claim that these biased representations have led to a situation where, even today, one of the main challenges faced by forensic voice specialists is to convince trial jurors, judges, lawyers, and police officers that forensic voice comparison can by no means give the sort of straightforward answers that fingerprints or DNA permit.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020054
Authors: Catalina Torres
This study investigates the intonation contours of neutral yes–no interrogatives produced by simultaneous bilingual children in their two native languages. Previous studies have shown prosodic transfer from one language to another, either from the dominant into the non-dominant language or vice versa, but little is known about what specifically triggers this behaviour. This study explores how bilingual children make use of phonetic–phonological resources while interacting with peers. Three child speakers of German (ambient language) and Portuguese (heritage language) were recorded as they performed a modified version of a map task. Natural and spontaneous data were collected and the speech was analysed. The results indicate that to some degree, bilingual children produce all intonational contours specific to their language variety. When speaking German, they produced the syntax and contour consistent with the structure of yes–no interrogatives in German. When speaking Portuguese, the children displayed variation in their choice of tune, depending on the variety of Portuguese and the language proficiency of their interlocutor. This behaviour is interpreted as prosodic convergence resulting from the high variability of prosodic structures in the different varieties of Portuguese present in the classroom.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020053
Authors: Bradford J. Lee Hayo Reinders Euan Bonner
Over the last three years, we have engaged in the development of a web-based mobile application called Classmoto that uses the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) to measure cognitive, behavioral, and emotional engagement in near real-time, with minimal disruption to the teaching and learning experience. The current study implemented Classmoto in an intact university language class in a Japanese university for an entire semester. We focused on learners’ experiences of using the app for two purposes: (1) to determine its face validity, and (2) to identify any constraints on and benefits from its practical application in an authentic pedagogic context, from the learners’ perspective. The results show that the instrument was able to measure the three sub-domains of engagement, as designed. In addition, participants praised the ESM for (a) giving them an opportunity for self-reflection, and (b) enabling the instructor to react to the students’ feedback instantaneously, with no negative feedback reported.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020052
Authors: Kendra V. Dickinson
This project explores the synchronic variation of participle forms in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). Despite general systematicity, the language maintains many historically irregular participles, which often compete with regularized variants. The language has also developed innovative participles, which tend to exist in variation with regular forms. Adopting a usage-based framework, the study examines how analogical processes affect persistent irregular participles and short-form forms in BP, emphasizing the role of grammatical context and frequency. Data are drawn from the Portuguese Web 2011 corpus, including 12 verbs with long-form Latinate irregulars (n = 4800) and 8 verbs with short-form forms (n = 3200). The results show that long-form Latinate irregulars are more common as adjectives and with the verb estar, while regularized forms are prevalent with ser and in perfect constructions. Conversely, short-form participles occur least frequently in perfect constructions, showing a tendency towards the maintenance of regularity in this context. Additionally, verbs that occur more often in perfect constructions are most resistant to innovation. These findings indicate that perfect constructions play a dual role in promoting and preserving regularity in BP and shed light on how grammar–internal relationships and contexts of occurrence play a role in language variation and change.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020051
Authors: Gaëtanelle Gilquin
Different methods and sources of information have been proposed in the literature to study the processing of language and, in particular, instances of formulaic language such as multiword units. This article explores the possibility of using pause placement in writing process data to determine the likelihood that a multiword unit is processed as a whole in the mind. The data are texts produced by learners of English and corresponding keylog files from the Process Corpus of English in Education (PROCEED). N-grams are selected on the basis of the finished texts and retrieved from the keylogging data. The pause placement patterns of these n-grams are coded and serve as a basis to compute the Pause Placement and Processing (PPP) score. This score relies on the assumption that n-grams which are delineated but not interrupted by pauses (hence taking the form of ‘bursts of writing’) are more likely to be processed holistically. The PPP score points to structurally complete n-grams such as in fact and first of all as being more likely to be processed holistically than structurally incomplete n-grams such as that we and to the. While the results are plausible and can be further substantiated by characteristics of specific n-grams, it is acknowledged that additional effects might also be at work to explain the results obtained.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020050
Authors: Emmanuel Ferragne Anne Guyot Talbot Hannah King Sylvain Navarro
Acquiring a consistent accent and targeting a native standard like Received Pronunciation (RP) or General American (GA) are prerequisites for French learners who plan to become English teachers in France. Reliable methods to assess learners’ productions are therefore extremely valuable. We recorded a little over 300 students from our English Studies department and performed auditory analysis to investigate their accents and determine how close to native models their productions were. Inter-rater comparisons were carried out; they revealed overall good agreement scores which, however, varied across phonetic cues. Then, automatic speech recognition (ASR) and automatic accent identification (AID) were applied to the data. We provide exploratory interpretations of the ASR outputs, and show to what extent they agree with and complement our auditory ratings. AID turns out to be very consistent with our perception, and both types of measurements show that two thirds of our students favour an American, and the remaining third, a British pronunciation, although most of them have mixed features from the two accents.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020049
Authors: Roland Hinterhölzl
In this paper, I argue that the phenomenon of complementizer agreement in West Germanic and the distribution of DPs in German can be given a common explanation in terms of an approach in which context values are not freely assigned via an interpretive function operation, as is assumed in standard accounts of formal semantics, but rather, they become accessible in a specific functional head in the C-domain.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020048
Authors: Caroline Féry Ingo Feldhausen Frank Kügler
The last decades have seen a renewed interest in the algorithms relating syntactic and prosodic structure since the ban on recursivity that had been prevalent in phonology for a long time was relaxed; see for instance Selkirk (2011) and Elfner (2012) for the Match constraints and Ito and Mester (2009, 2013) for the recursivity of the prosodic structure [...]
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020047
Authors: Shunichi Ishihara Sonia Kulkarni Michael Carne Sabine Ehrhardt Andrea Nini
It has been argued in forensic science that the empirical validation of a forensic inference system or methodology should be performed by replicating the conditions of the case under investigation and using data relevant to the case. This study demonstrates that the above requirement for validation is also critical in forensic text comparison (FTC); otherwise, the trier-of-fact may be misled for their final decision. Two sets of simulated experiments are performed: one fulfilling the above validation requirement and the other overlooking it, using mismatch in topics as a case study. Likelihood ratios (LRs) are calculated via a Dirichlet-multinomial model, followed by logistic-regression calibration. The derived LRs are assessed by means of the log-likelihood-ratio cost, and they are visualized using Tippett plots. Following the experimental results, this paper also attempts to describe some of the essential research required in FTC by highlighting some central issues and challenges unique to textual evidence. Any deliberations on these issues and challenges will contribute to making a scientifically defensible and demonstrably reliable FTC available.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020046
Authors: Leonardo Maria Savoia Benedetta Baldi
The main topic of this article is the relationship between morphosyntactic contexts and nominal inflections in Aromanian varieties of southern Albania. These varieties have a specialized inflection in the plural definite and feminine singular nouns, associated with genitive, dative, and prepositional contexts, where it is preceded by a Possessive Introducer. We present a detailed picture of the microvariation that characterizes the different systems. The broad syncretism that emerges suggests a rethinking of the syntactic status of inflections and the notion of Case. Our approach assumes that morphology is based on Merge within the syntactic computation and that sub-word elements are provided with interpretable content. This theoretical model will also guide us in the study of prepositions and their distribution.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020045
Authors: Silvina Montrul Sara Ann Mason Andrew Armstrong
Why is learning the gender of nouns so difficult for some bilinguals? We test the hypothesis that different language learning backgrounds or life experience with Spanish determine how learners follow different morphosyntactic cues for gender assignment in Spanish by testing learners with early and late language experience in an experiment with invented nouns. A total of 44 monolingually raised native speakers, 44 heritage speakers, and 44 L2 learners of Spanish were trained to learn 24 nonce words in Spanish presented in four input conditions that manipulated the number and type of cues to gender marking (determiner, word marker, adjective). After the learning sessions, the participants completed a word naming task, an elicited production task, and a debriefing questionnaire. The L2 learners were different than native speakers and heritage speakers in learning nonce nouns. They used morphosyntactic cues differently, relying on adjectives as their most-used strategy to assign gender, unlike native speakers and heritage speakers who used all cues. Our findings confirm processing differences between L2 learners and heritage speakers and suggest language learning background determines how learners discover reliable morphosyntactic cues to the gender of nouns in the input.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020043
Authors: M. Gabriela Puscama
The goal of this project was to explore how different types of vocabulary exposure shape the connections formed in the L2 lexicon and how these, in turn, affect L2 language processing. During L2 acquisition, words are often presented in thematic lists (e.g., food), favoring a lexicon organized by shared features (burger-hot dog). However, thematic lists offer only a partial picture of how words interconnect. For example, beer and football do not share any features and do not belong strictly to the same theme (food and sports, respectively); still, they co-occur frequently and are associated in the lexicon. A multisession training study and visual world eye-tracking tests were conducted to assess how different types of vocabulary exposure impact L2 processing. Intermediate L2 Spanish learners were trained under one of two conditions, thematic lists (TL, as in textbooks) or words presented in visual scenes (VS) with vocabulary related by co-occurrence. The VS group showed significant changes in their gaze patterns, resembling the naturalistic exposure baseline group (native speakers), more than the TL group. The results are interpreted in light of the anticipatory processing literature and the strength of representations as a result of naturalistic vs. formal exposure to L2 vocabulary.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020044
Authors: Roumyana Pancheva Maria Luisa Zubizarreta
This paper examines the orientation of evidentials in complements of attitude verbs, with Paraguayan Guarani evidential ra’e as a case study. It argues that embedded evidentials can be directed either towards the speaker or towards a matrix attitude-holder argument (e.g., the subject of the attitude verb) and that a syntactic representation of the evidence-acquisition event, with its pronominal subject, in the lower end of the CP field, is well-poised to capture this potential ambiguity. Language-particular properties can also play a determining role in the orientation of the embedded evidential, as is the case of the subordinator ha in Paraguayan Guarani. It is argued that this subordinator requires the presence of a Complementizer specified with a (strong) Modal component (which encodes certainty/commitment on the part of the attitude holder with respect to the embedded proposition) and that this property biases the orientation of ra’e towards the matrix attitude-holder argument.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020042
Authors: Céline Pozniak Claire Beyssade Laurent Roussarie Béatrice Godart-Wendling
This paper examines the relevance of the sentence concept to the understanding of three types of implicitness (presupposition, conversational implicatures, irony). Our experimental protocol involved 105 children (aged 6 to 11) and 82 adults who were asked to read short texts composed of a context about some characters and a target sentence conveying one of the three implicit contents. After reading, children and adults had to answer a comprehension yes-no question and indicate the segments from the text that helped them answer the question. Results showed a difference between the three types of implicitness, with presupposition being detected and understood at a subsentential level, whereas implicatures and irony come under extrasentential level requiring the context to be taken into account. Referring to sentence as a unit of meaning does not seem relevant as soon as understanding is not limited to the literal meaning of what is written, but also concerns what is meant by the text.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020041
Authors: Natalia Mazzaro Natalia Minjarez Oppenheimer Raquel González de Anda
Linguistic landscape (LL) studies in bilingual regions can reveal power dynamics between two languages, providing important information regarding their status and vitality. To analyze the relationship between Spanish and English in Ciudad Juárez, a city on the south side of the U.S.-Mexico border, we collected 1649 pictures of public signs in several sections of the city, whose “wellness levels” differ from each other. Pictures were coded for several factors, including language choice, business type, sign type, and the main and informative section, amongst others. Results show that while Spanish is the most frequently used language, English has a strong presence in the LL of Ciudad Juárez. The main factor affecting language choice is “business type”. Certain businesses within the “beauty” category tend to favor the use of English, while businesses within the “home” category favor the use of Spanish. An analysis of socio-economic status (SES) and language choice revealed a direct relationship between them: English is favored in high-income neighborhoods, while Spanish is favored used in low-income areas. The analysis of the main and informative sections on signs further confirmed the prestige assigned to English, which appears mostly in the main and most prominent sections of a sign. Our research shows that although Spanish vitality in Ciudad Juárez is strong, English is used in advertising because it is prestigious and increases the value of products and services, making them more appealing to shoppers.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020040
Authors: Jiaqi Hou Frédéric Landragin
In this article, we propose a multifactorial approach to salience analysis, examining the influence of five factors on the salience of referential entities in discourse. Significance tests and Cramer’s V tests were conducted to analyze textual data obtained through manual annotation of four text excerpts in French and in Chinese. The results show that almost all the factors have a significant influence on referents’ salience (except the animacy factor in one of the excerpts). While it seems difficult to predict a fixed ranking of salience factors, which depends more on textual characteristics than on differences between the two languages, the different values of each factor under investigation show an identical behavior in terms of the positive/negative contribution to salience. The results also suggest that some factors (syntactic function and syntactic parallelism) may have a more stable influence on referents’ salience than other factors (animacy, mobility, and main character), potentially constrained by textual properties such as the main character’s nature, its number of occurrences, and the possible existence of competing protagonists.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020039
Authors: Zhihui Zhong Alessandro Giovanni Benati
The present study was conducted to investigate the relative effect of structured input, referential activities, and affective activities on the acquisition of English causative forms. The processing of English causative structures is hindered by The First Noun Principle. Forty-one school-age Chinese learners of English as a second language were assigned to three treatment groups: (1) Structured input group; (2) Referential-only group; (3) Affective-only group. This classroom-based study adopted a pretest-posttest design. The test in the study assessed the interpretation and production of the target feature at the sentence level. Results showed that the structured input group, and the referential-only group made significant improvements in both the interpretation and production of English causative structure, while the affective-only group yielded almost no learning gains from pre-test to post-test.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020038
Authors: Mihaela Ilioaia
In this article, I address the evolution of the competition between two Latin patterns, habeo and mihi est, in Romanian. As opposed to the other Romance languages, which replace the mihi est pattern with habeo in possessor and experiencer contexts, Romanian maintains both Latin patterns. The general evolution of these patterns in the Romance languages is well known, however, a detailed usage-based account is currently lacking. Building on the theoretical findings on the role of functional competition in linguistic change, the rivalry between the two patterns in Romanian has already been argued to have settled in terms of differentiation, with each of the two forms specializing in different functional domains by Vangaever and Ilioaia in 2021 in their study “Specialisation through competition: habeo vs. mihi est from Latin to Romanian“. With this idea as a starting point, I investigate, by means of a diachronic corpus study, whether the dynamics in the inventory of state nouns occurring in these constructions can affect their evolution and productivity. The preliminary results show that this is indeed the case. Concomitantly, I explore whether the historical changes that the two patterns have undergone over the centuries can be described in terms of grammaticalization, constructionalization, or in terms of constructional change.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020037
Authors: Delia Bentley Francesco Maria Ciconte
Presentational constructions, i.e., structures which introduce an event into the universe of discourse, raise the question of what it means for a predication to be entirely new in information structural terms. While there is growing consensus that these constructions are not topicless, there is no agreement on how to analyse their topic. The Romance languages of Northern Italy have figured prominently in this debate because the presentational constructions of many such languages exhibit VS order and an etymologically locative clitic in subject clitic position. This clitic has been claimed to be a subject of predication in a syntactic subject position. Adducing primary comparative evidence from Milanese and Turinese, we discuss patterns of microvariation which suggest that the etymologically locative clitic need not be a syntactic subject and can mark an aboutness topic provided by the discourse situation alone. We propose a parallel-architecture, Role and Reference Grammar account whereby the microvariation under scrutiny is captured in terms of the interfaces that are involved in the parsing of utterances. This account considers discourse to be an independent module of grammar, which, alongside the semantic and syntactic modules, is directly involved in linguistic variation and change.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020036
Authors: Enrique Pato
If we understand Language as everything that is selected, numbered, merged and sent, and Grammar (both of the language and of the individual) as the union of Lexicon and Syntax, we share the same theoretical vision [...]
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020035
Authors: Wilbert Heeringa Hans Van de Velde
In this paper, we demonstrate the use of Visible Vowels to detect formant and durational differences between L2 and L1 speakers. We used a dataset that contains vowel measures from L1 speakers of French and from L2 learners of French, with Italian, Spanish and English as L1. We found that vowels that are not part of the L1 phonological system are often pronounced differently by L2 speakers. Inspired by the Native Language Magnet Theory which was introduced by Patricia Kuhl in 2000, we introduced magnet plots that relate vowels shared by the French phonological system and the learners’ phonological system—the magnet vowels—to the vowels found only in the French phonological system. At a glance, it can be seen which vowels are attracted to the magnets and which vowels become further away from the magnets. When comparing vowel spaces, we found that the shape of the French vowel space of the English learners differed most from the shape of L1 speakers’ vowel space. Finally, it was found that the vowel durations of the L2 speakers are greater than that of the L1 speakers of French, especially those of the English learners of French.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9020034
Authors: Gelsama Mara Ferreira Dos Santos Bruna Franchetto
In the Kuikuro language (Upper Xingu Carib), the construction tü-/ t-verb-i/-ti/-si/-stress is a reflex of the Carib proto-construction *t-V-ce, often labeled as a ‘participle’. It is a morphological form composed of a prefix and a set of allomorphic suffixes that attach to transitive, intransitive, transitivized, or detransitivized verb stems. In this paper, the construction tü-/ t-verb-i/-ti/-si/-stress is described and analyzed as a resultative denoting a grammatically represented result of an event that is the background of a subsequent foregrounded event. We argue that, in Kuikuro, the participial verb inflection has aspectual value and we define the construction tü-/ t-verb-i/-ti/-si/-stress as participial resultative aspect. Unlike in English, in Kuikuro, an ergative language, the resultative participial forms of transitive and transitivized verb stems license their external arguments. A description of the morphosyntax, semantics, and uses of Kuikuro participial forms precedes a final theoretically based approach that departs from Embick’s analysis of English participles. Our proposal for the analysis of the resultative participles in Kuikuro emphasizes the importance of this phenomenon for a comparison inside the Carib family and for ergative languages regarding the relationship between transitive resultative participles and ergativity.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9010033
Authors: Elisa Pellegrino
Little attention is paid to prosody in second language (L2) instruction, but computer-assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) offers learners solutions to improve the perception and production of L2 suprasegmentals. In this study, we extend with acoustic analysis a previous research showing the effectiveness of self-imitation training on prosodic improvements of Japanese learners of Italian. In light of the increased degree of correct match between intended and perceived pragmatic functions (e.g., speech acts), in this study, we aimed at quantifying the degree of prosodic convergence towards L1 Italian speakers used as a model for self-imitation training. To measure convergence, we calculated the difference in duration, F0 mean, and F0 max syllable-wise between L1 utterances and the corresponding L2 utterances produced before and after training. The results showed that after self-imitation training, L2 learners converged to the L1 speakers. The extent of the effect, however, varied based on the speech act, the acoustic measure, and the distance between L1 and L2 speakers before the training. The findings from perceptual and acoustic investigations, taken together, show the potential of self-imitation prosodic training as a valuable tool to help L2 learners communicate more effectively.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9010032
Authors: Marianna Kyriacou Franziska Köder
Encountering idioms (hit the sack = “go to bed”) in a second language (L2) often results in a literal-first understanding (“literally hit a sack”). The figurative meaning is retrieved later, subject to idiom familiarity and L2 proficiency, and typically at a processing cost. Intriguingly recent findings report the overextension of idiom use in inappropriate contexts by advanced L2 users, with greater L2 proficiency somewhat mitigating this effect. In this study, we tested the tenability of this finding by comparing eye-movement patterns for idioms used literally, vs. literal control phrases (hit the dirt) in an eye-tracking-while-reading paradigm. We hypothesised that if idiom overextension holds, processing delays should be observed for idioms, as the (over)activated but contextually irrelevant figurative meanings would cause interference. In contrast, unambiguous control phrases should be faster to process. The results demonstrated undifferentiated processing for idioms used literally and control phrases across measures, with L2 proficiency affecting both similarly. Therefore, the findings do not support the hypothesis that advanced L2 users overextend idiom use in inappropriate contexts, nor that L2 proficiency modulates this tendency. The results are also discussed in light of potential pitfalls pertaining to idiom priming under typical experimental settings.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9010031
Authors: Vasiliki Zarokanellou Alexandra Prentza Dionysios Tafiadis Gerasimos Kolaitis Katerina Papanikolaou
Background: This quasi-experimental comparative group study examined vocabulary knowledge and its associations with other language skills in Greek-speaking children with high-functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder and mild language impairment (HF-ASDLI) and typically developing (TD) peers. Methods: 25 children aged 7–10 years old participated in each group. Groups were matched in age, gender, and non-verbal IQ. Naming and word definition tasks were used to evaluate vocabulary knowledge in both groups. Results: Groups did not differ in the naming task; however, children with HF-ASDLI scored lower in the definition task. Both vocabulary tasks positively correlated with morpho-syntactic and overall language ability in both groups, although a significant positive correlation was detected between vocabulary knowledge and informational competence exclusively in the group with HF-ASDLI. Conclusions: Being in the HF-ASDLI group and having narrative ability significantly predicted participants’ performance in the definitions task, indicating that language impairment better explains vocabulary difficulties. These results agree with findings from the English language.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9010030
Authors: Ignacio Bosque
This article analyzes four interpretations of the adverb siempre ‘always’ that do not belong to general Spanish. The continuative and the progressive-comparative interpretations are argued to be calques of Italian, often attested in Rioplatense Spanish. In the first one, siempre is equivalent to Eng. still or ‘continue to + infinitive’, while in the second one it admits paraphrases with more and more, less and less, and the adverbs gradually and progressively. The third interpretation, in which siempre is roughly equivalent to after all, finally, and ‘end up + gerund’, will be argued to be concessive-adversative. This reading is more frequent in Mexico and Central America, but it is also attested in other American countries. The fourth reading is the attenuated interpretation, registered in part of the Andean area. In this meaning, siempre is equivalent to roughly or so so. It is argued that, with the possible exception of the last reading (whose origin is insecure), these different meanings of siempre coincide in the interpretation of this adverb as a universal quantifier, while they differ in the semantic nature of the quantified variable.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9010029
Authors: Mari Nygård Anne Kathrine Hundal
In this article, we investigate how grammatical competence is manifested in young students’ written texts and how this contributes to the students’ overall writing competence. We pose the following two research questions: (i) Which grammatical features appear in a selection of young students’ texts? and (ii) What do these features reveal about different aspects of the students’ grammatical writing competence? The empirical fundament for this study is a representative sample of texts gathered through the project FUS—Functional Writing in the First School Years. Our primary material amounts to a total of 534 texts written by first- and second-grade students (ages 6–7). The students have completed two writing tasks, in which they were asked to write one descriptive and one narrative text. In our analyses, we see grammatical writing competence as consisting of several sub-competencies—namely, grammatical repertoire, grammatical complexity, grammatical variation, and grammatical choice. Our analyses show that the grammatical repertoire of beginner students is well-developed. The frequency of specific grammatical features differs between the two writing tasks, underpinning the argument that certain text types trigger certain grammatical choices.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9010028
Authors: Juan-María Garrido Daniel Ortega
Assessment of prosody is not usually included in the evaluation of oral expression skills of L2 Spanish learners. Some of the factors that probably explain this fact are the lack of adequate materials, correctness models and tools to carry out this assessment. This paper describes one of the results of the ProA (Prosody Assessment) project, a web tool for the online assessment of Spanish prosody. The tool allows the online development of evaluation tests and rubrics, the completion of these tests and their remote scoring. An example of use of this tool for research purposes is also presented: three prosodic parameters (global energy, speech rate, F0 range) of a set of oral productions of two L2 Spanish learners, collected using the tests developed in the project, were evaluated by three L2 Spanish teachers using the web tool and the rubrics developed also in the ProA project, and the obtained ratings were compared with the results of the acoustic analysis of these parameters in the material to determine to what extent there was a correlation between evaluators’ judgements and prosodic parameters. The results obtained may be of interest, for example, for the development of future automatic prosody assessment systems.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9010027
Authors: John Blake Natalia Bogach Akemi Kusakari Iurii Lezhenin Veronica Khaustova Son Luu Xuan Van Nhi Nguyen Nam Ba Pham Roman Svechnikov Andrey Ostapchuk Dmitrei Efimov Evgeny Pyshkin
This paper discusses the challenges posed in creating a Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) environment for multiple languages. By selecting one language from each of three different language families, we show that a single environment may be tailored to cater for different target languages. We detail the challenges faced during the development of a multimodal CAPT environment comprising a toolkit that manages mobile applications using speech signal processing, visualization, and estimation algorithms. Since the applied underlying mathematical and phonological models, as well as the feedback production algorithms, are based on sound signal processing and modeling rather than on particular languages, the system is language-agnostic and serves as an open toolkit for developing phrasal intonation training exercises for an open selection of languages. However, it was necessary to tailor the CAPT environment to the language-specific particularities in the multilingual setups, especially the additional requirements for adequate and consistent speech evaluation and feedback production. In our work, we describe our response to the challenges in visualizing and segmenting recorded pitch signals and modeling the language melody and rhythm necessary for such a multilingual adaptation, particularly for tonal syllable-timed and mora-timed languages.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9010026
Authors: Patrick D. Thane
Studies on school-aged children have been infrequent in research on Spanish as a heritage language. The present study explored how dual-language immersion education, patterns of heritage language use, proficiency, and age shape child Spanish heritage speakers’ production and selection of differential object marking (DOM). A total of 57 English–Spanish bilingual children and 18 Spanish-dominant adults completed sentence completion and morphology selection tasks. Results revealed that the group of heritage speaker children that produced and selected the differential object marker most frequently was the seventh and eighth grade children (ages 12–14, the oldest in the study) who had completed a dual-language immersion program. Different factors accounted for variability in each task: bilingual education and proficiency affected the production of DOM, while age affected selection. Heritage speakers selected DOM more frequently than they produced this structure. These findings have implications for theories of heritage language acquisition that emphasizes that language experience and exposure account for differences between heritage speakers and argue for the dissociation of production from underlying syntactic knowledge. The data also argue that heritage speakers may possess a bilingual alignment for DOM, whereby underlying receptive knowledge is modulated by cumulative exposure, while production depends more on bilingual education and proficiency in Spanish.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9010025
Authors: Cătălina Ramona Corbeanu Virginia Hill
This paper aims to define the featural composition of the complementizers that introduce subjunctive complements in Istro-Romanian, and to identify the internal organization of the subjunctive clause in terms of subject positions, verb movement, clitic placement and constituent fronting. In a nutshell, the observation is that the complementizer neca replaces se within the syntactic pattern of Old Romanian; that is, a pattern that displays intra- and inter-language variation with respect to the distribution of complementizers within the subjunctive CP. Tests of word order also indicate intra-language variation in the parametric settings for clitic placement (either high or low), for the argumental subject position (either in Spec,TP, yielding SVO, or in Spec,vP, yielding VSO) and for constituent movement under discourse triggers (either scrambling or fronting to CP).
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9010024
Authors: Grant Armstrong
Yucatec Spanish displays a type of sentence that appears to mix elements of an active impersonal and a passive. For example, “te castigaron por mi tío” may be interpreted as “you were punished by my uncle”, where a by-phrase headed by the preposition por introduces an agent rather than a cause or reason. The verb has active morphology—it is always third-person plural, and accusative clitics (e.g., te) and DOM-marked objects are possible. This type of sentence, which I descriptively label an active–passive (A-P) hybrid, has been mentioned in previous literature on contact varieties in Mayan-speaking regions of Mexico and Guatemala, but it has not been precisely described or analyzed formally. I argue that A-P hybrid constructions are instances of grammatical object passives. Grammatical object passives have certain active properties—accusative case is assigned to a theme argument and the morphology of the verb is active, but like passives, they require that the expression of the agent be a by-phrase rather than a grammatical subject. I claim that this is possible in this variety of Spanish due to the emergence of a null pronoun, absent in other varieties of Spanish, that can merge in the specifier of Voice and restrict, rather than saturate, an agent argument, permitting the subsequent addition of a third-person by-phrase. I demonstrate that this analysis is able to explain its hybrid properties as well as other person restrictions on the by-phrases that express the agent. Finally, I describe avenues of future research that will help discern the role that language contact may have played in the emergence of A-P hybrids.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9010023
Authors: Chikako Takahashi
This study presents evidence of second language (L2) influence on first language (L1) perception of alveolar stops. Sixty-one L1 Japanese late learners of L2 English (onset ~12 years old) in Japan (N = 31) and in the US (N = 30) participated. We examined late L2 learners’ L2 perceptual ability and L1 perception drift by administering three perception tasks (AX discrimination, forced categorization, and goodness rating) on word-initial stop consonants. The L2 learners’ L1 Japanese and L2 English data were compared to those of Japanese and English monolinguals, respectively (N = 21, N = 16). All participants’ production data were also gathered to examine potential perception-production relationships. Late learners’ sensitivity patterns along a synthesized /da–ta/ continuum differed significantly from those of monolingual speakers, with a sensitivity peak location between the monolingual Japanese and English groups. This suggests that late learners’ voicing category boundaries may have been influenced by L2 English learning. The L2 learners’ goodness rating patterns of L1 Japanese stimuli also showed evidence of L1 perceptual drift: L2 learners tended to be more accepting of Japanese stimuli with longer VOTs compared to Japanese monolinguals.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9010022
Authors: Mariška Bolyanatz Abril Jiménez Isabella Silva DePue
Utterances containing verbal irony display prosodic particularities that distinguish them from non-ironic speech. While some prosodic features of irony have been identified in Spanish, previous studies have not accounted for different subtypes, nor have they examined this phenomenon in Chilean Spanish despite the unique intonation patterns in this dialect. This study examined the acoustic and prosodic correlates of five subtypes of irony (jocularity, rhetorical questions, understatements, hyperbole, and sarcasm) spontaneously occurring in the casual speech of sociolinguistic interviews with fifteen Chilean women. We segmented 3907 syllable nuclei from 197 spontaneously occurring instances of irony and compared the syllables within the ironic utterances to those in the pre-ironic utterances, along seven acoustic and prosodic variables: pitch range, duration, F0, F1, F2, H1*–H2*, and HNR. The results showed that the speakers favored jocularity and did not produce sarcasm or understatements, and that jocularity, hyperbole, and rhetorical questions significantly differed from the baseline utterances along a variety of acoustic and prosodic measures. We argue that these cues contributed to marking the ironic utterances as salient, allowing these women to talk about difficult real-life events with a touch of humor. Our study provides additional evidence for the connection between prosody and pragmatics in Chilean Spanish and lays the groundwork for further examination of irony and prosody in this and other Spanish dialects.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9010021
Authors: Nicholas Catasso
In this paper, two syntactic configurations are considered that involve V-to-C movement in present-day German: Verb Second in run-of-the-mill declarative clauses and Verb Second in non-assertive embedded contexts. Along the lines of the cartographic approach and on the basis of syntactic and semantic evidence, it is proposed that in both constructs, the finite verb targets neither Force° nor the head of any other projection hosting a moved constituent in its specifier, but, rather, that it moves into the lowest head in the extended CP layer, namely Fin°. As a result of this, (at least) two types of verb raising to Fin° are to be postulated in this language: one that is triggered by discourse/information structure (V21) and one that results from mechanical movement to C elicited by an otherwise lacking lexicalization of the relevant left-peripheral head (V22).
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9010020
Authors: Silvia Gumiel-Molina Norberto Moreno-Quibén Isabel Pérez-Jiménez
This paper aims to provide a clearer understanding of the structure known in the literature as the innovative use of estar, illustrated in sentences like Luego salgo/voy a visitar usuarios que están muy morosos [Medellín, Colombia; Preseea] (“Today I am going to visit users that are.ESTAR defaulting debtors”). In such sentences, no comparison is established between stages or counterparts of the subject of predication with regard to the property expressed by the adjective, as opposed to estar-sentences in standard/general Spanish. This innovative structure is a syntactic scheme employed throughout different Latin American Spanish varieties. The goal of this paper is twofold: it is both descriptive and theoretical. From a descriptive perspective, it offers an exhaustive and updated empirical characterization of the extent of this structure in Latin American Spanish based on an analysis of the Preseea corpus. This description takes into consideration both its geographical distribution in the different Latin American dialectal varieties and the lexical–syntactic classes of adjectives that appear as predicates in innovative estar-sentences. Building on this, from a theoretical point of view, a critical evaluation is made of the existing proposals in the literature that explain the properties—both syntactic and semantic—of the innovative construction.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9010019
Authors: Ștefania Costea Adam Ledgeway
This article reviews some of the principal patterns of morphosyntactic variation within Daco-Romanian and across Daco-Romance in support of a distinction between low vs high V-movement grammars variously distributed in accordance with diatopic variation (Daco-Romance: west vs east, Aromanian: north vs south), diachronic and diagenerational variation (Megleno-Romanian) and endogenous vs exogenous factors (Istro-Romanian). This approach, which builds on the insights of the Borer–Chomsky conjecture, assumes that the locus of parametric variation lies in the lexicon and the (PF-)lexicalization of specific formal feature values of individual functional projections, in our case the clausal heads T and v and the broad cartographic areas that they can be taken to represent. In this way, our analysis locates the relevant dimensions of (micro)variation among different Daco-Romance varieties in properties of T and v. In particular, we show that the feature values of these two heads are not set in isolation, inasmuch as parameters form an interrelated network of implicational relationships: the given value of a particular parameter entails the concomitant activation of associated lower-order parametric choices, whose potential surface effects may consequently become entirely predictable, or indeed render other parameters entirely irrelevant. In this way we can derive properties such as verb–adverb order, auxiliary selection, retention vs loss of the preterite, the availability of a dedicated preverbal subject position, the distribution of DOM, and the different stages of Jespersen’s Cycle across Daco-Romance quite transparently, based on the relevant strength of T and v in individual sub-branches and sub-dialects.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9010018
Authors: Marina Y. Sokolova Mikhael Levandovski
The study investigates psycholinguistic mechanisms of sentence parsing and ambiguity resolution by balanced Tatar–Russian bilinguals who learnt English as their additional language. We check the parser’s sensitivity to the selectional properties of the matrix verb and/or social conventions in processing and attachment resolution of ambiguous relative clauses (RCs). We chose English and Russian because they have a documented preference for low attachment (LA) and high attachment (HA), respectively, and Tatar, as we have found out in earlier work, has no attachment ambiguity. We conducted a self-paced reading task in English and Russian which returned 61% HA in Russian, 49% HA in English. It was followed by a pen-and-paper translation task. The translation post-test checked whether an attachment preference demonstrated in either English or Russian showed in RC translations into Tatar. The results return an 80% preference for LA in English–Tatar translations and 61% in Russian–Tatar translations. Both syntactic information and world knowledge influence online RC processing in Russian and English. Therefore, the multilingual parser incorporates information from multiple sources in either L1 or Ln processing. The parser may favor LA as a default parsing option while maintaining sensitivity to individual grammars (Russian), where this preference should be overridden.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9010017
Authors: Aldo Olate Ricardo Pineda
Possession has been scarcely studied in the variety of Spanish in contact with Mapudungun and in Chilean Spanish. In this contribution, we analyze the nominal possessive constructions found in a corpus of interviews with speakers from five communities: three Mapudungun–Spanish bilingual communities from the Araucanía Region, one Spanish monolingual rural community from the Bío Bío Region, and one Spanish monolingual urban community from the Araucanía Region. The possessive constructions found in the contact Spanish, rural Spanish, and urban Spanish varieties are analyzed and compared to describe the domain of possession and to propose some possible explanations from the perspective of language contact theory for the case of the Spanish spoken by bilinguals. From the corpus of transcribed interviews, nominal possessive constructions were selected, classified, described, and compared. Double possession with restrictive relative clauses, and unstressed possessive pronouns plus a prepositional phrase with genitive/specific value, showed a limited frequency of occurrence. These constructions are analyzed using the Code-Copying framework. This perspective accounts for the observed equivalencies between both languages in contact and the constructions emerging in the bilinguals’ speech. This work contributes to the documentation of the variety and, more generally, to the description of the expression of possession in the Latin American contact varieties of Spanish.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9010016
Authors: Avel·lina Suñer Gratacós
In this paper, I analyze, from a compositional perspective, the relevant features to construct the interpretation of immediate succession between a subordinate event and the event that takes place in the main sentence. Among all the components involved in the construction of the meaning of immediate succession, I focus particularly on the subordinators, which present a mosaic of variation in current Spanish. The key ideas that can be derived from the data analysis are the following. First: subordinators of immediate succession are the loci of variation of temporal subordinates. Second: a subordinator of immediate succession is a “linguistic variable” that can be syntactically materialized in different forms by applying general rules that do not change the meaning, although sometimes they do change the grammatical category. Third: in the diachronic evolution of Spanish, several patterns of internal structure have emerged for immediate succession subordinators. However, most of them have ceased to be productive, although some subordinators that were coined with these patterns have survived as fossils in the current language. Fourth: the only productive pattern in the present language can be reduced to the Adv (immediacy) + que scheme, which goes back to Late Latin.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9010015
Authors: Imanol Suárez-Palma
This paper examines data from Spanish middle-passive sentences whose grammatical subject contains a body-part noun, externally possessed by means of a dative possessor. I advocate for an analysis whereby the possessor originates inside the theme DP and raises to the specifier of an applicative projection to be licensed with dative case. I show that the unmarked order for dative DPs in these configurations is preverbal. These phrases may appear as the sole preverbal constituent, presumably in preverbal subject position, thus forcing the theme DP to remain inside the VP; alternatively, both the dative DP and theme DP can occur preverbally, in which case, the former appears to be left dislocated while the latter would be probed to preverbal subject position. This last scenario leads to a minimality violation, since the theme would be probed over the empty pronominal standing for the possessor that must necessarily sit in Spec, ApplP for the inalienable possession construal to obtain. Instead, I argue that both preverbal dative and theme DPs in Spanish middle-passive sentences are left dislocated and corefer with empty pronominals inside the sentence; the null dative possessor, being closer to T° always raises to subject position, which avoids any potential intervention effects. Finally, I explore how these data can be analyzed within a paratactic approach.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9010014
Authors: Irene Fioravanti Luciana Forti Veronica D’Alesio Maria Roccaforte Stefania Spina Sabine Koesters Gensini
Collocations are one of the most studied types of word combinations. Their intricate nature, based on varying degrees of restriction, begs the question as to how modifications in their typical form influence the way they are processed by native speakers and learners. In this study, an eye-tracking experiment was carried out. We compared native speakers and learners of Italian when processing typical (i.e., common) and atypical (i.e., uncommon) collocations of Italian. Atypical collocations were developed by manipulating the grammatical and lexical components of a set of typical collocations. We also investigated how the online processing was affected by the different modifications (i.e., lexical and grammatical) performed and proficiency levels included. Both kinds of modifications disrupt collocation processing, with lexical modification being generally more salient than grammatical modification in terms of processing costs. Further, proficiency level influences phraseological processing, with varying effects related to the different kinds of modifications. The findings of our study are largely in line with previous research, while providing new insights into how lexis and grammar affect phraseological processing. They contribute to the evidence on languages other than English, a still under-researched domain in second language acquisition as a whole.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9010013
Authors: Marlies Jansegers Chantal Melis Jennie Elenor Arrington Báez
This study investigates the contemporary grammaticalized uses of perdón (‘sorry’) in two varieties of Spanish, namely Mexican and Peninsular Spanish. Methodologically, the investigation is based on a taxonomy of offenses, organized around the concept of ‘face’ and based on spoken data of Spanish from Mexico and Spain. This taxonomy turns out to be a fruitful methodological tool for the analysis of apologetic markers: it does not only offer usage-based evidence for previous theorizing concerning the grammaticalization process of apologetic markers, but also leads to a refinement of these previous results from a contrastive point of view. Evidence from both corpora suggests a more advanced stage in the grammaticalization process of perdón in Mexican Spanish, where it can be used not only as a self-face-saving device geared towards the positive face of the speaker, but also in turn-taking contexts oriented towards the negative face of the interlocutor. Peninsular Spanish, on the other hand, resorts to a more varied gamut of apologetic markers in these contexts.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9010012
Authors: Andrea Pešková
This explorative study examines intonation contours in neutral and non-neutral statements of Paraguayan Spanish, a variety shaped by extensive contact with Guarani, a co-official language of Paraguay. Paraguayan Spanish displays both lexical and syntactic borrowings from Guarani, along with innovative intonation patterns not found in other Spanish varieties. Previous but still limited research on yes/no and wh-questions in this variety suggests the emergence of a unique intonational system, possibly of a hybrid nature, in both Spanish monolinguals and Spanish–Guarani bilinguals. To date, no comprehensive description of intonation patterns in Paraguayan Spanish statements exists. The present study addresses this gap by analyzing data obtained through a Discourse Completion Task, covering broad-focus statements, contrastive focus, exclamatives, and statements of the obvious. Data were collected in 2014 from two monolingual speakers, eleven bilingual Spanish-dominant speakers, and eight bilingual Guarani-dominant speakers. The intonation is formalized using the Autosegmental–Metrical model of intonational phonology and the Spanish Tones and Break Indices labeling system. The findings reveal three main realizations of nuclear accents (L+H*, H+L*, and innovative >H+L*) in neutral and non-neutral declarative sentences, lengthening of syllables, diverse syntactical strategies, and lexical borrowings. The study contributes to the understanding of a lesser-studied Spanish variety and offers insights into theoretical aspects of contact linguistics.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9010011
Authors: Jorge Agulló
Existential sentences in Spanish are sensitive to the definiteness or quantification restriction or effect, which prevents personal pronouns, proper nouns, and definite constituents from occupying the pivot position. Contact varieties between Spanish, a robust language as regards the effect, and Catalan, which has a weaker version, remain largely unexplored. This paper fills this void. A large corpus was gathered to quantitatively study the variation between definite and indefinite pivots. Examples involving definite, specific pivots and even proper names, hitherto unnoticed, are brought to the fore. The pivot of the existential in Spanish is argued to bear Partitive case, as shown by (i) pronominal existential pivots in other Romance languages, (ii) the phi-feature defectiveness of the clitic out of the pivot position, (iii) and partitive pronouns with unaccusatives in Spanish. The hypothesis is put forth that varieties of Spanish in contact with Catalan no longer relate Partitive case to the non-definiteness of the pivot.
]]>Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9010010
Authors: Alibek Jakupov Julien Longhi Besma Zeddini
Digital forensic investigations are becoming increasingly crucial in criminal investigations and civil litigations, especially in cases of corporate espionage and intellectual property theft as more communication occurs online via e-mail and social media. Deceptive opinion spam analysis is an emerging field of research that aims to detect and identify fraudulent reviews, comments, and other forms of deceptive online content. In this paper, we explore how the findings from this field may be relevant to forensic investigation, particularly the features that capture stylistic patterns and sentiments, which are psychologically relevant aspects of truthful and deceptive language. To assess these features’ utility, we demonstrate the potential of our proposed approach using the real-world dataset from the Enron Email Corpus. Our findings suggest that deceptive opinion spam analysis may be a valuable tool for forensic investigators and legal professionals looking to identify and analyze deceptive behavior in online communication. By incorporating these techniques into their investigative and legal strategies, professionals can improve the accuracy and reliability of their findings, leading to more effective and just outcomes.
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