Languages, Volume 8, Issue 4

Romance free choice items (FCIs) are frequently pointed out as resulting from the grammaticalization of the relative determiner qual ‘which’ and an element derived from a volition verb, such as querer ‘want’. Contrary to other...

This paper explores the evolution of the conversational formula pues eso in Peninsular Spanish through the framework of constructionalization, so as to describe how form–meaning pairings have been consolidated. Additionally, the Val.Es.Co. mode...

Deísmo is a non-standard dialectal phenomenon consisting of the insertion of a non-required preposition de ‘of’ before a non-finite clause: Me apetece (de) salir ‘I want to go out’. In most papers, de is analyzed as a d...

The artistic performance of identity by top Latin music artists can be heard on many Top-40 US radio stations, since, as of July 2023, 20% of the Billboard Hot 100 is (Spanish language) Latin music. This study aims to determine the variants found in...

This study explores the dynamics of questioning practices and speech-style shifting in Korean entertainment talk shows. While prior research has examined the topic of questioning practices in the Korean language, mostly in everyday conversation or ed...

Syntactic adaptation effects have been demonstrated for an expanding list of structure types, but the mechanism underlying this effect is still being explored. In the current work on filler-gap dependency processing, we examined whether exposing part...

The present study investigates the prosodic realization of calling contours by bilingual speakers of Bulgarian and (Bulgarian) Judeo-Spanish and monolingual speakers of Bulgarian in a discourse completion task across three pragmatic contexts: (i) neu...

Centering stances, positionalities, and style, the third wave of sociolinguistic study positions individuals at the heart of its analysis [...]

In this paper, we discuss the evidential properties of inferential interrogative sentences with qué in Spanish. This interrogative type exhibits the shape of a wh-question but the interpretation of a polar question. These sentences have the ad...

An individual’s social identity, often overlooked in Europe in the field of Spanish as a second or foreign language (S2L/SFL), has always been the focus of attention in the teaching of heritage Spanish in the USA, especially in programmes desig...

In this article, we explore the possibility of evaluating L2 pronunciation, and, more specifically, L2 vowels, without referring to a native model, i.e., intrinsically. Instead of comparing L2 vowel productions to native speakers’ productions,...

This article deals with the analysis of word order variation regarding subjects, direct objects, and non-direct object phrases called the “Target” in the corpus of languages of northwestern Iran, viz., Armenian, Mukri Kurdish, and Northea...

Native Spanish speakers commonly confuse third person singular possessive determiners when making gender agreements, which is considered an error-prone grammatical feature because there are syntactic differences in their use between English and Spani...

We assessed the impact of non-native language input on Spanish–English bilingual preschool-age children’s language skills. Most participants (96%) had language skills within the average range. We examined whether the number of native Engl...

Is children’s acquisition of structural knowledge driven by prediction errors? Error-driven models of language acquisition propose that children generate expectations about upcoming words (prediction), compare them to the input, and, when they...

This paper examines discourses around the religious and social practice of taqiyya among members of the Sulaymani Isma‘ili community in Saudi Arabia. Isma‘ilism, in the context of 1200 years of anti-Shi‘a discrimination, cultivated...

The present study explores the exclamative use of the feminine definite article la in structures such as ‘¡La de chicos que besé en la fiesta!’ (How many guys I kissed at the party!). First, a morphosyntactic description of t...

Film remakes represent a form of cinematic translation that reconstructs various elements of the original text. This article relies on the translation strategies of domestication and foreignization to analyze “Āṣḥāb Wā...

The current study investigated overregularization of Spanish irregular past participles (e.g., dicho ‘said’, regularized as decido) among 20 child heritage speakers of Spanish in New Mexico, ages 5;1–11;9. Overregularization occurs...

The current study examines variation in copula selection in Spanish by looking at the written productions of three groups of language learners in the United States, including heritage learners, those with English as an L1, and international students...

Clitic doubling (CD) is the co-appearance in the same sentence of the clitic and a correlative syntagma in the canonical position of the object. Apart from obligatory contexts, CD of the indirect object (IO) is found with variable frequency in Romanc...

Spanish copula choice ser/estar and the semantic and pragmatic distinctions that derive from their alternation in predicate adjective constructions have been discussed in several studies focused on the features of Spanish as a heritage language, usua...

This paper investigates the lexicalization of the complementizer that/que in English and Spanish varieties in different contexts along the left edge of the clause. This is performed through discussion of a range of constructions traditionally attribu...

This paper aims to (i) establish the micro-parametric variation in the development of the subjunctive CP in Romanian languages (Daco-Romanian/DR; Aromanian/AR; Megleno-Romanian/MR; Istro-Romanian/IR) and (ii) account for derivations in which the subj...

This study examines how implied speaker nationality, which serves as a proxy for bilingual/monolingual status, influences social perception and linguistic evaluation. A modified matched-guise experiment was created with the speech of eight bilingual...

This study investigates the acquisition of grammatical gender in Russian learners of Greek. Agreement in Determiner-Noun (Det-N) and Adjective-Noun (Adj-N) dependencies is explored through eye-tracking registration in a reading-based design. Twenty-f...

The present study investigates the developmental trajectory of abstract representations for syntactic structures in children. In a structural priming experiment on the dative alternation in German, we primed children from three different age groups (...

This study explored the language and literacy practices of multilingual families in Cyprus, Estonia, Germany, Israel, and Sweden during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study focuses on the different roles of family members in language transmission in orde...

This study takes the Yong-deng dialect as a case study to investigate the phenomenon of tonal merging observed in Northwest Chinese dialects. It begins by examining the various monosyllabic tone patterns of the Yong-deng dialect, then supplements thi...

This paper presents an analysis of syntactic collocations that include the constraints on an adjective phrase (AP) and adverbs or final particles (X) in the ɬwa:n⁵ + AP + X construction, as well as its pragmatic features and grammatical fu...

This paper investigates the term “sea” (hai) in the four-character Chinese idioms according to conceptual metaphor and metonymy theory, attempting to illustrate their conceptualization, determine their possible underlying motivations, and...

This paper focuses on the analysis of a specialised American police discourse genre and is based on a corpus of 115 probable cause affidavits. A probable cause affidavit is a sworn statement written by American police officers to state that there is...

Little work has examined the L2 acquisition of Spanish stress, and especially the production of its acoustic correlates, and the work that has is largely limited to inexperienced learners. This study examines the production of stress by L1 English/L2...

Spanish nouns are classified as either feminine or masculine. Although some nouns vary depending on their denotation (such as niño ‘male child’ vs. niña ‘female child’), in most cases a fixed gender is assigned....

This study takes us to the Greek diasporic community in Cairns, Far North Queensland, Australia. The data analyzed derive from audio-recorded conversations with first-generation Greek immigrants collected during fieldwork in 2013. Drawing on interact...

The main objective in this study is to describe and offer an account of verbal non-local doubling in Patagonian Spanish (PatSp), an understudied non-standard variety of Spanish in Argentina. We focus on data in which there are duplicated verbs surrou...

This work describes the cooptation/grammaticalization process developed by the expression no veas. The hypothesis it defends, endorsed by previous research, considers that in this process, this expression appears in different constructions, originall...

This paper explores the different ways in which speakers of Limburgian think and feel about sociopragmatic pronouns in their dialect, in which women can traditionally be referred to with both ziej ‘she’ and het ‘she’ (lit. &ls...

This article explores the effects of different task repetition schedules on English learners’ oral fluency in terms of speed, breakdown, and repair indices using a PRAAT script to enhance objectivity and consistency in the assessment of learner...

Simultaneous bilingual and bicultural children who are schooled in the dominant societal language can acquire literacy in their home language through home literacy practices and weekend school. Twenty-eight Japanese-English bilingual–bicultural...

In this paper I investigate the ne…ne construction in Turkish, illustrated by Ne Ali ne (de) Esra geldi ‘Neither Ali nor Esra arrived’. The meaning of the ne…ne construction roughly corresponds to the meaning of the neither&...

In this paper, we study a syntactic construction that has received little attention in the study of Spanish grammar (La masa de pizza congela perfectamente, ‘Pizza dough freezes perfectly’). It is characterized by the presence of a verb i...

Little is known of the trajectory of grammar in neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) once adulthood and language maturity are reached. Yet, impairments in grammar are reported in children with both communication NDDs, such as Developmental Language Di...

This study examined the robustness and efficiency of four large language models (LLMs), GPT-4, GPT-3.5, iFLYTEK and Baidu Cloud, in assessing the writing accuracy of the Chinese language. Writing samples were collected from students in an online high...

The sentence-initial coordinating conjunctions (and, but), referred to in the literature as SIA and SIB, have been well established as discourse markers beyond their syntactic function as connectors of related propositions. In reference to the proof-...

This study empirically investigates functional and social variation in the use of TAYYIB (‘okay, well, right’) in light of grammaticalisation. Thirty naturally occurring conversations of 60 Najdi Arabic speakers were recorded in Riyadh, S...

Linguistic change in morphology is usually discussed mainly in relation to change in inflectional morphology. In this paper, the focus is shifted to derivational morphology, where the issues are not entirely the same. In particular, the origins (or b...

The language learning field is not exempt from benefiting from the most recent techniques that have revolutionised the field of speech technologies. L2 learning, especially when it comes to learning some of the most spoken languages in the world, is...

This paper addresses the analysis of variations in structures that are projected in discourse. Starting with the relationship between evidential adverbs and the affirmative Spanish adverb sí, I review the occurrence of the conjunction que &ldq...

A large body of cross-linguistic research has shown that complex constructions, such as subordinate constructions, are vulnerable in bilingual DLD children, whereas they are robust in bilingual children with typical language development; therefore, t...