Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11110235

Authors: Aniello De Santo

It is well-known that the acceptability judgments at the core of current syntactic theories are continuous. However, an open question is to what extent gradience has to be situated in the grammar itself, or can be derived from extra-grammatical factors (e.g., processing limitations). This paper explores these issues through a model of gradience rooted in the connection between categorical grammars and processing mechanisms, building on a computational framework that links structure-building operations to memory usage. As a proof-of-concept, I leverage structure-sensitive measures of processing effort to evaluate whether categorical representations can derive patterns of gradience, recast as pairwise contrasts, reported in the experimental literature. I show that this approach allows us to derive acceptability differences between items deemed equally well-formed by the underlying categorical grammar. I then discuss the value of this framework for theory evaluation, and for future work on linking hypotheses that fruitfully integrate probabilistic and processing-based insights into the relation between grammaticality and continuous acceptability.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11110234

Authors: Gino Damas-Espinoza Victor Rojas-Rivera Vicente Romo-Perez

Language simultaneously constitutes a social practice, a communicative resource, and a marker of belonging, but the language learned in childhood, the languages a person reports speaking, and ethnocultural self-identification do not necessarily coincide. This study analyzed the concordance among these three dimensions among Peruvian adults with Quechua or Aymara as their mother tongue, paying particular attention to social, educational, territorial, and generational differences. A secondary cross-sectional analysis of the 2022 National Reading Survey was conducted. After applying quality restrictions, the general analytical dataset included 43,104 individuals aged 18 to 64 years; 7688 reported Quechua or Aymara as their mother tongue, and 7365 had complete information to construct the concordance profile. Full concordance coincidence between mother tongue, self-reported speaking of the same language, and ethnocultural identity was 80.08% among individuals with Quechua as their mother tongue and 86.83% among those with Aymara as their mother tongue. In the adjusted model, Aymara as a mother tongue was associated with higher odds of full concordance than Quechua (OR = 2.57; 95% CI: 2.04–3.23). Secondary education (OR = 0.64; 95% CI: 0.54–0.75) and higher education (OR = 0.48; 95% CI: 0.40–0.59) were associated with lower concordance compared with basic education. Residence in the Highlands was associated with higher concordance than Metropolitan Lima (OR = 3.90; 95% CI: 3.19–4.78), while the Coast and Jungle showed no statistically significant differences. The interaction between mother tongue and age was significant (p = 0.0078), indicating that there is no single generational pattern. A careful sensitivity analysis using the eight original territorial domains produced concordant results. These findings suggest that mother tongue, self-reported linguistic repertoire, and ethnocultural identity are closely related but not interchangeable dimensions, whose alignment depends, to a large extent, on the social, educational, and territorial context.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11110233

Authors: Trang Phan Masaaki Shimizu

This article traces the written history of Vietnamese chiếc, a classifier of early Chinese origin that coexists with the later literary Sino-Vietnamese reading chích. This study examines 63 occurrences in nine texts, from early Hán Nôm Buddhist materials to Quốc ngữ prose from the mid-twentieth century, and codes them by construction, semantic domain, discourse function, and textual setting. The earliest clear attestation, chiếc giày “a shoe” in Thiền tông Khóa hư ngữ lục, occurs beside the Buddhist expression 隻履, chích lí, which provides a specific entry context mediated by contact. Subsequent texts do not reproduce a single Chinese distribution. Instead, chiếc enters Vietnamese quantified phrases, classifier noun phrases without numerals, phrases marked for plurality, proper name constructions, and elliptical reference. Its tokens remain sparse in most texts, but nineteenth-century travel prose supplies a dense vessel pattern, while Sống mòn extends the classifier to pointable artifacts, clothing, and teeth. This article therefore distinguishes grammatical integration from a change in which a lexical item becomes grammatical: a borrowed classifier is redistributed through constructions in the recipient language and through discourse shaped by particular genres. The findings support a modest account of constructional expansion shaped jointly by contact, Vietnamese nominal syntax, semantic persistence, and textual ecology. Tracing one classifier across different textual settings makes it possible to distinguish its Chinese source, the textual channel through which it entered Vietnamese, and the Vietnamese constructions that shaped its later use.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11110232

Authors: Wenqing Zhang

Evidence of Zipf’s law in children’s own speech comes almost entirely from parent–child interactions, and it remains unclear whether children’s word-frequency distributions in peer conversations show the same patterns and how they change with age. We analyzed the speech of 70 English-speaking children aged 34–88 months in peer conversations, drawn from four CHILDES corpora. For each child, Zipf–Mandelbrot distributions were fitted by maximum likelihood to the overall, content-word, and function-word distributions at normalized sample sizes. Each child’s distributions were well approximated by the Zipf–Mandelbrot model but could not be distinguished from a lognormal model; they are therefore best described as heavy-tailed and near-Zipfian. Function words dominated the high-frequency end and had steeper distributions than content words. In the three corpora with overlapping age ranges, older children had lower exponents for the overall, content-word, and function-word distributions; this effect rested mainly on one corpus covering about 3 to 5½ years. In exploratory analyses, the age-related decline in the exponent was most consistently accompanied by an increase in content-word types. These findings extend near-Zipfian distributions and their age-related flattening to children’s peer conversations.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11110231

Authors: Manuela Gómez-Suta Julián D. Echeverry-Correa Paula M. Herrera-Gómez

Impulsivity is a multidimensional trait implicated in several neurodevelopmental conditions; some externalizing symptoms have been associated with impaired executive functions and oral language features in children and adolescents although finer underpinnings remain poorly understood. We present the ImpulsivityBank protocol, a standardized procedure for collecting language samples and language and literacy measures, and the Impulsivity corpus derived from its application. The corpus includes 181 Colombian Spanish-speaking children and adolescents aged 8–17 years recruited from public schools and not having mental or neurological disorders. Participants completed the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale for Children (BIS-11c), four language and literacy tasks (naming, concept formation, reading comprehension, and verbal fluency), and three language elicitation tasks (storyboard, recall task, and picture description). Language samples were transcribed and coded. We conducted two sets of analyses. First, we examined associations between impulsivity and the language and literacy measures. Second, we examined associations between impulsivity and four language sample measures (lexical diversity, lexical density, speech disfluency, and function word frequency) while considering whether these associations varied across language elicitation tasks. After adjustment for school year, school, and gender and correction for multiple testing, we found no evidence that impulsivity scores in a community setting were associated with any language and literacy measure or language sample measure, or that its associations with the four language sample measures varied across the three language elicitation tasks in our dataset, given the measures used. ImpulsivityBank provides a standardized methodological framework and a Colombian Spanish corpus for further investigation of dimensional variation in impulsivity and oral language across childhood and adolescence.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11110230

Authors: Riho Grünthal

The article focuses on diachronic change of clausal negation in nonstandard insular varieties which constitute the westernmost area of North Estonian dialects. While contemporary North Estonian varieties display, as a rule, a simple and historically eroded negation system with an uninflected auxiliary, the Insular subdialects have preserved a different past-tense negative auxiliary until very recently. Presumably, the inherited default pattern for both present- and past-tense clausal negation originally involved a connegative form of the main verb that is unmarked in most Finnic varieties, whereas the negative auxiliary would be inflected for person and number. In contemporary data, the morphosyntax of basic clausal negation in nonstandard varieties is influenced by secondary patterns that are characteristic of Standard Estonian. The data are drawn from the Muhu (historically German Mohn) subdialect, which manifests the overlapping of inherited and secondary negation patterns. Recently, it has been shown that the increased use of compound past-tense forms in Insular subdialects differs from other North Estonian varieties, possibly due to German influence. This correlates with the use of certain negative clause types. Although it is difficult to find evidence of the direct involvement of language contact in the development of clausal negation in Insular Estonian, the synchronic variation indicates the morphosyntactic sphere of significant typological changes in negation over a long period. A more detailed analysis shows that the contrast between local variation in Insular Estonian, inherited Finnic, and, more broadly speaking, Uralic constructions, highlights those grammatical categories involved in long-term language change. While the negative auxiliary has preserved its primary semantic function, the marking of other grammatical properties within the negative phrase is more prone to change. The main hypothesis of this article is that variation in the investigated varieties shows that the abundance of parallel morphosyntactic patterns in Insular Estonian subdialects originates in different strata of prehistoric Finnic and Uralic varieties.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11110229

Authors: Gila Tubul-Lavy Hen Meltzer

Rhyme, defined as the phonological overlap from the primary stressed vowel to the end of a word, is a central component of phonological awareness, a foundational skill in literacy acquisition. While the core principles of rhyming are shared across languages, it remains unclear whether rhyme judgments are made over rimes or over the whole prosodic word, because English studies typically use monosyllables, in which the word, syllable, rime and stress domain coincide. Hebrew, where word length and stress location vary independently, allows researchers to test these accounts. The current study examines the effects of syllable number and stress location on rhyme detection and production in pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, elementary-school children, and adults (n = 120). All groups preferred rhymes that matched the target in syllable count and stress pattern. The length preference was graded and, contrary to expectation, strengthened with age, favoring a prosodic-word comparison over rime-based and input-based accounts. Stress acted as a near-categorical constraint already in kindergarten, so the two constraints followed different developmental courses. Rhyme comparison thus appears to become anchored to the prosodic word during development. The findings also inform a hierarchical framework for teachers and clinicians supporting early phonological development.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11110228

Authors: Jingxia Lin Ming Chew Teo

This study examines the synchronic relationship between clause-final hor and ba in Singapore Mandarin, two discourse particles that overlap functionally but differ in their pragmatic profiles. Using spontaneous multi-party data from televised variety programs, we combine an exploratory corpus description with a bidirectional substitution task involving Singapore Mandarin speakers with linguistic training. Substitutability was asymmetric across the sampled contexts: hor was accepted in a larger share of ba contexts than ba was in hor contexts. Among substitutions judged at least marginally acceptable, the clearest pragmatic effect was a change in perceived forcefulness. Replacing hor with ba tended to make an utterance softer or less forceful, whereas replacing ba with hor tended to make it stronger or more forceful. The findings show that functional overlap between discourse particles can be directionally structured, and suggest that the centrality of each particle’s pragmatic contribution to the interactional action may help explain patterns of substitutability. More generally, bidirectional substitution provides a way to reveal pragmatic differentiation that corpus distribution alone may not capture.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11110227

Authors: Gayane Hovhannisyan Hamest Tamrazyan

This study examines how address forms and honorific titles functioned as markers of politeness, status, and social positioning within the Armenian merchant diaspora in India between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Drawing on 128 Armenian funerary inscriptions from the Endangered Archives Programme (EAP1721), the article analyses titles and respect markers carved on gravestones in Madras, Kolkata, Hyderabad, and Mumbai. Using digital epigraphy, corpus annotation, and contact pragmatics, the study traces the evolution of honorific systems across three prestige frameworks: Armenian ecclesiastical hierarchy, Persianate administrative culture, and British colonial civic titles. Early inscriptions emphasize genealogical and geographic origin within transregional networks, while later monuments increasingly incorporate colonial titles and bilingual Armenian–English address forms. Rather than replacing heritage forms, new honorifics accumulate alongside traditional ones, indexing multiple audiences simultaneously. Read against the history of the New Julfa merchant network, this trajectory records a shift in the basis of prestige from communal reputation to institutional recognition. The article expands the methodological scope of heritage-language pragmatics by demonstrating how migrant communities encode hierarchy, prestige, and belonging in durable commemorative genres.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11110226

Authors: Maria Esipova

In this paper, I explore the distinction between non-truth-conditional affective a.k.a. expressive meanings (as in my fucking dog) and truth-conditional affective and affect-related meanings (as in my lovely/disgusting dog) from an architectural perspective. Specifically, I focus on the differences in whether and how these meanings interact semantically with their surroundings and discuss the implications of these differences for our formal theories of meaning. In particular, I show that expressive meanings do not have to interact semantically with their syntactic surroundings, but truth-conditional meanings do even when they are affect-related and not-at-issue. This contrast holds even when the two types of meaning are contributed by uncontroversially the same type of morphosyntactic objects, as is the case for affection-expressing diminutive suffixes (non-truth-conditional) vs. derogatory/pejorative suffixes (truth-conditional) in Russian. This warrants a complete separation of the two types of meaning in our formal semantic theories—contrary to theories that treat expressive meaning as some type or other of truth-conditional, but not-at-issue meaning. In addition, I demonstrate that we observe some of the same typology of affective and affect-related meanings as conveyed through “secondary” channels, such as prosody, facial expressions, and non-face gesture, as we do for fully conventionalized segmental morphemes (i.e., “words”). I furthermore show that we routinely make use of a productive mechanism of going from performative, non-truth-conditional expression of affect to demonstrations of such expression within pieces of truth-conditional meaning of the general form ‘(such that) it would make me/one go “DEMONSTRATION”’, which we can then compose with other truth-conditional content. Once again, we observe this process at work both for “words” (e.g., in at least some instances of spoken word expressives used for degree intensification) and for other types of meaning–form mappings (e.g., facial expressions and/or prosody conveying some form of surprise-related or negative affect)—and we can, thus, apply the same formal analysis to all these cases. I take the cross-channel similarities in how the expressive vs. truth-conditional distinction manifests to be an argument against the common tendency to indiscriminately label any instances of affect-related meaning conveyed through “secondary” channels as “paralinguistic” and, thus, something that we as formal linguists should not concern ourselves with.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11110225

Authors: Angela Ralli Michail Vaitis Vasilis Kopsachilis Apostolos Makaratzis Vasileia Alexelli

In many countries, electronic language mapping is a well-established field of research. In Greece, however, research of this kind is still at an early stage, and the Electronic Dialectal Atlas of the Aegean island of Lesbos (EDAL) constitutes the first attempt to develop such a tool. Freely accessible in both Greek and English, EDAL in its current form comprises 113 linguistic maps, corresponding to dialectal phenomena, words, and expressions that are distributed across the levels of phonology, morphology, morphophonology, morphosyntax, and vocabulary. The first collection of dialectal material was carried out between 2010 and 2015, while the second phase lasted from 2019 to 2021. Data collection relied on a specially designed questionnaire, administered to native, permanent-resident informants of both sexes, all over 60 years of age and of low educational attainment, to maximize the likelihood of eliciting conservative dialectal forms. This article presents the actual linguistic and cartographic methodology underlying EDAL’s development, together with its technical architecture, as has been redesigned and implemented in 2025 by the Laboratory of Cartography and Geoinformatics at the University of the Aegean. Moreover, it discusses its contribution to the documentation of Modern Lesbian, an underrepresented dialect, as well as to electronic language mapping in Greece.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11110224

Authors: Miina Norvik Uldis Balodis Atte Huhtala John L. A. Huisman Helle Metslang Karl Pajusalu Eva Saar Pire Teras Janek Vaab

The Southern Finnic branch has traditionally been defined as including Estonian, South Estonian, Livonian, and Votic. This study examines how phonological and morphosyntactic features contribute to the internal grouping of these varieties from an areal-typological perspective. The analysis covers 38 Finnic varieties (including 26 Southern Finnic varieties), and a total of 84 phonological and morphosyntactic features, primarily drawn from the UraTyp dataset and its extension EstTyp. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are applied to compare groupings based on different feature sets. The results show that phonological and morphosyntactic features yield partly different groupings, e.g., Northeastern Estonian varieties pattern phonologically with Northern Finnic, while morphosyntactically they are closer to the North Estonian varieties. The most salient Southern Finnic features reflect either innovation or continuity, with morphosyntactic innovations being particularly prominent. Some of these features are also characteristic of the broader eastern part of the Circum-Baltic Area. The findings underline the importance of distinguishing between different levels of language structure when analysing language relationships. They also demonstrate that inheritance and language contacts interact in shaping Finnic variation.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11110223

Authors: Rebecca Pozzi Chelsea Escalante

This Special Issue includes studies in the growing area of second language (L2) sociolinguistics [...]

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11110222

Authors: Mohammad Hamad Al-khresheh Wael Alharbi Mayez Almayez Shatha F. Alruwaili

Despite the growing use of mobile technologies for English listening practice, the relationships linking mobile-assisted listening use with perceived listening improvement and confidence remain insufficiently understood. This study employed a quantitative cross-sectional survey design to examine the relationships among mobile-assisted listening use, listening strategy use, listening engagement, and perceived listening improvement and confidence among EFL learners. Following instrument validation, data were collected from a convenience sample of 715 Saudi undergraduate EFL learners and analysed using structural equation modelling. The findings revealed that mobile-assisted listening use was positively associated with listening strategy use and listening engagement. Listening strategy use was positively associated with both listening engagement and perceived listening improvement and confidence, whereas listening engagement showed the largest standardised coefficient in relation to perceived listening improvement and confidence (β = 0.427). The direct relationship between mobile-assisted listening use and perceived listening improvement and confidence was not statistically significant (β = 0.013, p = 0.770). In contrast, the sequential indirect effect through listening strategy use and listening engagement was positive and statistically significant (β = 0.069, 95% BCa CI [0.045, 0.098]). These findings suggest that perceived listening improvement and confidence are associated less with mobile listening use itself than with learners’ reported listening strategy use and engagement. Mobile-assisted listening use showed a significant indirect association with perceived listening improvement and confidence through the hypothesised pathway involving listening strategy use and listening engagement, rather than a significant direct association.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11110221

Authors: Khalaf Alharbi

This longitudinal study investigated whether early changes in second language (L2) speech perception among Saudi bilingual returnees following repatriation reflected phonological attrition or sociophonetic accommodation. Thirty young Saudi Arabic English bilinguals (aged 14 to 19), who had lived and attended school in the United States during childhood, were assessed shortly after returning to Saudi Arabia and again five months later. The study focused on the perception of two English phonemes absent from Arabic, the voiceless bilabial stop /p/ and the voiced labiodental fricative /v/, which are commonly substituted by /b/ and /f/, respectively, in Arabic-accented English. Data collection included a demographic questionnaire, pronunciation screening to confirm accurate production of the target phonemes, an Acceptability Judgment Task (AJT), and a Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT). Perceptual accuracy declined over time for both phonological contrasts, although the reduction was substantially greater for /v/ than for /p/, while pronunciation accuracy, spontaneous oral production, and grammatical judgment remained stable. These findings suggest that the earliest changes following return to an L1-dominant environment are more consistent with sociophonetic accommodation than with phonological attrition. The study highlights the importance of distinguishing changes in the acceptability of accented speech from changes in underlying phonological representations when investigating early L2 attrition. Implications are discussed for theories of bilingual speech perception, language attrition, and future research employing direct phonological discrimination tasks.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11110220

Authors: Annie Bangtegan Domede Juma Ali Al Ghafri Sree Lakshmi Ammanamanchi Dulce Imelda Nicolas-Mercado

This exploratory study described the linguistic patterns characterizing public signs in selected Omani communities and examined EFL students’ vocabulary recall, spelling accuracy, and perceptions of public signage as a potential language-learning resource. Using a multi-source exploratory descriptive design, the study analyzed 105 photographs of public signs, written responses from 43 students, and interviews with seven of these students. The linguistic landscape was predominantly bilingual, with Arabic consistently occupying the more prominent position, reflecting Oman’s language-policy context. Other patterns included domain-specific terminology, combinations of local and global linguistic resources, and non-standard English forms, including spelling and grammatical deviations. The written activity yielded 190 recalled lexical items, of which 40 were excluded because they did not meet the established criteria, leaving 150 items for analysis. Among the recalled items analyzed, 129 (86%) were correctly defined or described, while 142 (94.67%) were spelled accurately. These results represent accuracy within the recalled-item dataset and do not establish that the words were acquired through exposure to public signs. Interview findings indicated that participants generally perceived public signs as helpful for noticing English words and becoming more familiar with their meanings and spellings. Overall, the findings provide preliminary descriptive evidence that public signage may serve as a potentially useful supplementary source of authentic English input in Omani EFL contexts.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11110219

Authors: Sarah Babinski Lewis Esposito K. David Harrison

The people of Mwoakilloa (population < 200) and the Mwoakilloan diaspora (ca. 2000) represent a resilient Oceanic culture that has adapted to both island life and migration across the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) and to the United States. We describe collaborative work by Mwoakilloan speakers with linguists documenting their language and culture through oral environmental narratives recorded in both English and Mwoakilloan. Narrative topics selected by Mwoakilloan community experts include canoe-building, foodways, navigation, origin myths such as “The Lazy Giant”, personal reminiscences, and metalinguistic reflections. We also present the Mwoakilloan Talking Dictionary, a customized digital platform containing an extensive environmental lexicon with associated audio recordings, designed for community use and language revitalization. In centering documentation on stories, oral histories, and lexica relating to the natural world, we demonstrate how linguistic and socio-cultural expression surface through environmental knowledge. We should note that this approach is in alignment with the community’s own priorities surrounding their linguistic and cultural preservation. This approach highlights Indigenous understandings of how biodiversity is embedded and co-created in language practices, and it begins to align language documentation with environmental humanities and conservation biology, all of which view local knowledge as vital for sustainable futures. Overall, we suggest that emphasizing nature-based narratives in documentation and revitalization work produces multidimensional records that demonstrate how endangered languages serve as living archives of environmental knowledge.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11110218

Authors: Francesca Romana Moro Luigi Sausa

This study investigates contact-induced changes in the language of Tagalog–Italian bilingual heritage speakers in Italy, focusing on word order and voice. Drawing on data from 85 participants across four groups—Tagalog homeland speakers, first-generation immigrants, second-generation heritage speakers in Italy, and baseline Italian speakers—the study examines how structural overlap between Tagalog and Italian shapes bilingual grammars. The analysis of elicited descriptions of transitive events reveals clear asymmetries across domains. In the word order domain, second-generation speakers exhibit a shift from typical Tagalog verb-initial order to verb-medial order, reflecting convergence toward Italian and English. In contrast, the voice system remains relatively stable: the voice contrast is preserved across generations, and the only significant generational difference is a higher rate of actor voice in patient-oriented contexts among second-generation speakers, which suggests emerging variability rather than a restructuring of the system. These results indicate that word order is more susceptible to cross-linguistic influence, while voice resists transfer due to its typological distinctiveness and lack of direct equivalents in Italian and English. At the same time, minor changes in voice distribution may reflect reduced sensitivity to discourse-pragmatic constraints rather than structural reanalysis. Overall, the findings support a model of partial grammatical sharing, whereby shared structures are reinforced while non-overlapping domains remain distinct.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11110217

Authors: Liina Lindström Maarja-Liisa Pilvik Helen Plado

This article investigates negated constructions with the copular and auxiliary verb olema ‘to be; to have’ in Estonian dialects, focusing on the near-synonymous analytic construction ei ole and the synthetic form pole. The study combines a diachronic overview of the Uralic negative auxiliary and its development in Estonian with a corpus-based analysis of semi-spontaneous spoken data from the Corpus of Estonian Dialects. On the basis of 11,601 observations, the article examines the distribution of ei ole and pole across dialects, the use of primary and secondary negation words, the alternation between pre- and postverbal negation, and the co-occurrence of these constructions with negative polarity items, clitics, and indefinite pronouns. The results confirm previous findings by showing that pole is a North Estonian feature but is most strongly associated with the Insular dialect and, to a lesser extent, the Western and Mid dialects. South Estonian dialects strongly prefer ei ole and retain tense-marked negation with past tense negation word es. The findings demonstrate that negated olema constructions provide a useful window onto dialectal variation, grammaticalization, and constructional competition in Estonian negation.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11110216

Authors: Ruslana Margova

Digital communication in the post-truth era creates conditions for lexical innovation, pragmatic refunctionalization, and semantic change, particularly in languages experiencing intensive contact with English. This study examines selected lexical and semantic developments in Bulgarian digital discourse during 2016–2026 through a qualitative analysis of 36 lexical units and 89 dated contextual records. Bulgarian provides a relevant case as a language that is not demographically endangered but remains comparatively under-resourced in computational linguistic infrastructures. Three potentially overlapping analytical categories are distinguished: Semantic Hijacking, involving the pragmatic refunctionalization of established expressions; Lexical Voids, concerning naming instability and lexical accommodation; and Digital Semantic Reconfiguration, describing the extension or reorganization of established semantic and referential configurations without implying lexical disappearance. The study introduces the Digital Living Dictionary (DLD) as a structured qualitative evidence resource linking dated contextual attestations, lexicographic references, and explicit analytical decisions to support transparent and revisable documentation of lexical developments. A pilot LingvoScanner workflow integrated CLASSLA-Stanza morphosyntactic annotations with manual lexicographic verification. The findings illustrate how digitally mediated lexical change encompasses not only new vocabulary but also shifts in communicative functions and extensions of established meanings. The proposed framework contributes to evidence-oriented linguistic documentation in comparatively under-resourced digital language contexts without claiming automated detection. Future research will focus on expanding the diachronic evidence base, introducing independent expert validation, and developing LingvoScanner toward continuous lexical monitoring of semantic change in Bulgarian.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11110215

Authors: Berke Şenşekerci Adam Przepiórkowski

Generative linguistics typically treats grammaticality as a binary matter, attributing the gradient effects frequently observed in acceptability judgment experiments to performance factors rather than to the grammar. Yet no specific performance account has, to our knowledge, been offered for most such effects, which strengthens the case for gradient grammaticality. Gradient judgments, however, have received little systematic study in experimental syntax, and the frameworks built on existing findings are better characterized as blueprints than formalized grammars. This paper takes a step towards closing both gaps. Four acceptability judgment experiments, two in English and two in Polish, manipulated violations of two constraints: subject–verb agreement and syntactic selectional restrictions. The results show that violation costs are systematically gradient, differing by constraint and by predicate, and reliably cumulative in that two violations are generally worse than one. Crucially, however, they combine under-additively rather than by linear summation as commonly assumed. We then outline Gradient Model-Theoretic Dependency Grammar, a formally explicit, monostratal, constraint-based framework in which constraints are adorned with stochastic penalty weights and violations combine through an under-additive function. As a proof of concept, we apply it to one of our experiments to estimate weights from the judgment data and derive acceptability predictions.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11110214

Authors: Nabeeha Al-Shrou Dina M. Hammouri Oday Alshorafat

This study investigates the pragmatic functions of kafū in Jordanian Arabic, focusing on how a conventionally positive evaluative expression acquires different pragmatic interpretations in naturally occurring interactions. Drawing on Speech Act Theory and Stance Theory, the study analyses about 10 h of conversational data comprising 120 tokens of kafū produced by 30 Jordanian Arabic speakers aged 25–50. The analysis identifies 10 pragmatic functions: praise, approval, admiration, ridicule, annoyance, disapproval, surprise, anger, disappointment, and shock. The findings show that kafū is primarily an expressive evaluative resource whose pragmatic force is shaped by the interaction between its conventional meaning, the surrounding discourse, the speaker’s evaluative stance, and contextual circumstances. While praise, approval, and admiration are compatible with the expression’s conventional positive orientation, ridicule, annoyance, disapproval, anger, and disappointment arise when speakers exploit this positive meaning in contexts that render a literal positive interpretation inappropriate. Surprise and shock, in turn, reflect affective reactions to unexpected information. The study also shows that contextual incongruity plays a central role in extending the pragmatic potential of kafū, allowing speakers to employ a positively oriented expression for negative or ironic purposes without altering its conventional semantic meaning. These findings highlight the context-sensitive and interactional nature of pragmatic meaning in Jordanian Arabic and show how evaluative expressions can serve as flexible resources for constructing stance and affect in everyday conversation.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11110213

Authors: Abdullah Thalji Farah Alazhari

Jordanian Arabic uses a single definite article, al-, across functions that other languages split across multiple morphological forms. This paper introduces the Jordanian Arabic Definite Article Corpus (JADAC), the first spontaneous-speech corpus documenting the functional distribution of al- (N = 2658 NPs; approximately five hours of YouTube speech across three formats). When quantified against a crosslinguistic referential typology, the distribution follows a clear three-way pattern: 41.5% of NPs serve canonical definiteness functions, 18.1% build genus-level kinds in generic statements, and the remainder follow the expected indefinite pattern, except for a small subset, roughly 5%, showing structurally governed form-function mismatches. We argue that al- operates through two operations. The first isolates unique or maximal referents in episodic contexts; the second builds abstract kinds from predicates in generic ones. Most apparent mismatches follow from these same mechanisms rather than from semantic attrition. Within this mismatch subset, we identify a previously undescribed reverse pattern. Elative and ordinal constructions appear without the article despite denoting semantically definite referents, the inverse of the well-documented case where definite marking fails to deliver it. These findings supply new empirical data for formal accounts of kind-reference and article typology from a language and construction type not previously documented.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11100212

Authors: Cory Bill Todor Koev

The previous literature has distinguished between two types of bias in polar questions: “original bias”, which reflects the speaker’s prior belief regarding the truth of the answers, and “contextual bias”, which conveys freshly introduced evidence for or against a given answer. Building on these two fundamental biases and employing a novel diagnostic based on bare polar response particles, we argue for the existence of a third type of bias, which we call “projected bias”, indicating the answer that the speaker considers most likely to enter the Common Ground. We posit this flavor of bias on account of its distinct alignment pattern, which cannot be attributed to merely mirroring one of the two fundamental biases or to a random choice between the two. Specifically, while projected bias requires the presence of a fundamental bias in order to arise, it may align with either of them and displays a strong affinity with contextual bias when the two fundamental biases are in conflict. We capture this alignment pattern by appealing to differences in evidential strength between original and contextual bias, thereby highlighting the manner in which projected bias coordinates on the discourse goal shared by the speaker and the addressee of resolving the issue raised by the question. We make our proposal explicit by implementing it within the Scoreboard Model.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11100211

Authors: Tatiana Davidyuk

This paper investigates person-number agreement with coordinate subjects in Russian, focusing on cases where the conjuncts differ in person. While normative grammars and descriptive studies describe only resolved agreement and closest conjunct agreement in VS word order, corpus and experimental data show that speakers also accept 3rd person agreement patterns that do not follow the person hierarchy 1 > 2 > 3. These agreement patterns receive intermediate acceptability ratings in the experiments. The paper synthesizes existing experimental results on conjunctive subjects and presents new experimental data on disjunctive subjects. Conjoined subjects allow 3rd person plural agreement, whereas disjoined subjects allow both plural and singular 3rd person agreement. Agreement patterns depend on word order and coordination type, with closest conjunct agreement particularly prominent in VS structures with disjunction. I propose a minimalist analysis in which the coordination phrase lacks a person feature, resulting in 3rd person agreement, while resolved agreement is derived via Multiple Agree with conjuncts. The contrast between conjunctive and disjunctive subjects follows from their different feature specifications. The Russian data show that non-canonical agreement patterns are systematic and provide important evidence for the structure of coordination.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11100210

Authors: Bhavya C P V. M. Subramanya Sharma

The Malavedan language is a severely endangered Dravidian tribal tongue spoken in the Kollam, Kottayam, and Pathanamthitta districts of Kerala, India. While historically overshadowed by its dominant neighbour, Malayalam, current field documentation (2025) reveals a pronominal and address system that has resisted the hierarchical complexities characteristic of the broader region. This paper documents that system and frames it as a bidirectional comparative study: it examines not only what Malavedan lacks relative to Malayalam, but what Malavedan possesses that Malayalam does not. Malayalam encodes a graduated honorific system through its second-person pronominal distinctions, /n̪iː/, /n̪iŋŋaɭ/, and /t̪aːŋkaɭ/, and through third-person honorific forms /id̪d̪eːham/ and /ad̪d̪eːham/ that grammaticalize deference toward a referred-to third party. Malavedan has none of these forms. ‘Egalitarian’ is used here in a strictly grammatical sense, to mean that the pronominal paradigm does not rank the people it refers to; it does not mean that the community lacks deference, which it expresses through titles, kin terms and bodily conduct. What Malavedan has instead is a three-way proximal/distal/far-distal deictic contrast that Malayalam lacks entirely. The far-distal forms /t̪oːʋarə/ (that man, far) and /t̪oːt̪t̪uʋə/ (that woman, far) fuse the deictic distance marker /t̪oː-/ with adult gender information in a single form, a strategy that has no equivalent in Malayalam, whose pointing word /at̪aː/ ‘there’ carries no gender. When the referent is a child, for whom adult gender distinctions are inapplicable, the gender-neutral far-distal form /t̪oːt͡ʃt͡ʃə/ is used instead, with gender if needed carried by the accompanying noun. This adult/non-adult split within the far-distal demonstrative slot has no Malayalam parallel. Taken together, these distance contrasts point to a language that has invested its grammatical resources in locating people in physical space, where Malayalam has invested its own in ranking them socially. The structural gap produced by Malavedan’s egalitarian architecture generates a pragmatic clash when speakers interact with Malayalam-medium institutions, forcing reliance on borrowed ‘Sir’ and ‘Madam’ to navigate social hierarchies that the native system has no grammatical resources to express. Despite this structural flatness in the social domain, Malavedan possesses a sophisticated insider lexicon that performs crucial social work: coded referents for police (/kiːt̠t̠uʋaːjan/), exonyms for surrounding communities, an endonym (/t͡ʃaːd̪ikaːɾə/) that asserts collective identity on the community’s own terms, and ambivalent status terms, like /ɲon̪d̪alə/. Intergenerational transmission has effectively broken down, and children now operate almost entirely within the Malayalam framework. Documenting this shift is more than lexical salvage. It records an indigenous social map before the pressure of a dominant, deeply stratified language erases the pragmatic logic on which that map was built.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11100209

Authors: Angelika Kiss Justin R. Leung Jianing Zhou

Chinese languages offer multiple ways to form a polar question. In this paper, we examine five Sinitic languages: Mandarin, Shanghainese, Changsha Xiang, Cantonese, and Taiwanese Southern Min, and using a panel of tests, we test all the available forms to determine which of these polar question forms are syntactically interrogative sentences and which are declarative sentences used as questions. We find that shifou-questions, A-not-A questions, kam-questions, as well as particle questions with a particle originating from a negative adverb are interrogative sentences, and particle questions with an origin other than negation and intonation questions are declarative questions. Negative particle questions were the least uniform category: some of them patterned with interrogatives, while others, with declaratives.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11100208

Authors: Muffy Siegel Florian Schwarz

Two generally agreed upon characteristics of presuppositions are projection and backgroundedness. Yet, presuppositions sometimes fail to project. To derive the necessary local interpretations, standard semantic local accommodation accounts posit an operation that, inside the scope of an embedding operator, turns content lexically marked as presupposed into non-backgrounded content and conjoins it with the clause’s entailed content. Such accounts, as well as syntactic operator accounts descended from them, suggest that locally accommodated presuppositions might differ from projecting presuppositions in lacking not just projectivity, but also the second basic presuppositional property of backgroundedness. Recent pragmatic accounts arrive at a parallel, even stronger prediction of non-backgroundedness for locally accommodated content via their claim that all and only backgrounded material projects. To date, though, this idea, that non-projecting presuppositional content is also not backgrounded, has never been empirically tested, perhaps due to challenges in testing embedded material for backgroundedness directly. Using reduced cognitive salience as a measure of presuppositional backgroundedness, we present data from picture-matching and novel information-seeking tasks to indirectly evaluate the backgroundedness of locally accommodated presuppositions of also and continue. Baselines are provided by their explicit, non-backgrounded conjunction paraphrases and equivalent non-presuppositional elisions. Existing standard local accommodation accounts lead us to expect equivalence across all three, since they represent all three as non-backgrounded. However, our outcome measures indicate greater backgroundedness for locally interpreted presuppositions than equivalent explicit proffered content and elision controls (though to a lesser degree for the latter). We find similar patterns for global accommodation and for occurrences of also and continue that require no accommodation at all. These findings indicate that the interpretation of presuppositional content associated with lexical triggers should be modelled in a way that marks it as having a discourse status more backgrounded than that of main content in the same clause. Standard models accomplish this for globally accommodated and non-accommodated presuppositions by ensuring that the dynamic semantics includes their content in the context of interpretation of the clause in which the trigger occurs. However, such a direct solution is not available for locally accommodated presuppositions, as it fails to distinguish between the significantly backgrounded status we find for locally accommodated content and the non-backgrounding of identical content presented non-presuppositionally. We suggest augmenting standard representations of backgroundedness with variable givenness features in order to represent accurately the conventional backgroundedness marking of presuppositions.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11100207

Authors: Todd Snider

There is a prevailing assumption in the at-issueness literature that utterances express exactly one content (usually a proposition) that is at-issue, with any other contents being not-at-issue. This article examines this assumption critically, asking whether it can ever be the case that multiple contents are at-issue simultaneously. Looking at the three leading approaches to defining at-issueness, and considering them as both backward- and forward-oriented phenomena, we observe some similarities and some divisions among how these approaches answer this question. We spotlight conjoined question sequences, an empirical construction that might require multiple contents to be simultaneously at-issue, and discuss how these various approaches might account for the observed data.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11100206

Authors: Nief AL-Gamdi

This study investigates the closure-to-vowel ratio (CVR) as a primary, rate-normalized temporal cue to voicing in Arabic stops, within the framework of the Hyper–Hypo theory of speech adaptation and Articulatory Phonology. A sample of 30 Arabic speakers of the Saudi dialect was selected to produce voiced and voiceless stops at normal and fast speech rates. The words considered for analysis were disyllabic and analyzed acoustically to measure the stop-closure duration and the duration of the following vowel. The speech rate, place of articulation, and effects of voicing were analyzed via Linear mixed-effects models. Results showed a strong main effect of voicing, with voiced stops exhibiting significantly lower CVR values than voiceless stops. Across places of articulation, the voicing contrast was identical. The CVR was a fixed, rate-robust temporal mark of distinction of voicing in Saudi Arabic stops. Consistent timing between oral closure and the following vowel in utterers’ speech was observed even in cases of reduced articulation, supporting the notion of adaptive speech production and coordinated gestures. Overall, the study highlights the importance of relational timing in shaping phonological contrast. In the realm of phonetic research, voicing contrast in stops is better conceptualized as a matter of relative temporal mechanism rather than absolute durational differences. Several limitations leave room for future research.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11100205

Authors: Öykü Mercan Çetin

This convergent mixed-methods study investigates international learners’ perceptions and academic outcomes associated with the strategic use of English as an instrumental language in Turkish as a foreign/second language (TFL) instruction. Combining a survey of 113 multinational learners with a 6-week quasi-experimental intervention at the B2 level (experimental group, n = 10; control group, n = 12), the study contrasts self-reported skill priorities with objective post-test performance. Survey findings indicate that learners prioritized instrumental language support primarily for grammar (M = 3.01) and vocabulary (M = 2.97), while viewing it as least necessary for writing and speaking. Conversely, post-intervention achievement comparisons revealed a skill-specific paradox: while no statistically significant differences emerged in grammar, vocabulary, reading, listening, or writing, the experimental group achieved significantly higher speaking scores (p = 0.007, r = 0.67) than the target-language-only control group. Qualitative responses suggest that instrumental language availability may function less as a metalinguistic grammar tool and more as an affective scaffold and psychological safety net, consistent with the possibility that it mitigates anxiety and facilitates communicative engagement, although these affective mechanisms were not directly measured. These preliminary findings support a judicious, skill-differentiated pedagogical model wherein Turkish remains the primary instructional medium while strategic cross-lingual resources are preserved for cognitively complex and emotionally demanding speaking tasks.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11100204

Authors: Kenneth Hanson

Recent research in computational linguistics has found that most long-distance linguistic dependencies are tier-based strictly 2-local (TSL-2) over their respective representations, providing a precise characterization of blocking elements in phonology and syntax. A subset of the well-known syntactic island effects have been claimed to be one such class of blockers, explaining their superficial diversity via a common computational basis. This article revisits the TSL-2 analysis of islands in light of subsequent work on other types of syntactic locality constraints and on the treatment of gradient blocking. It finds that the TSL-2 islands display variation and gradience of the sort found in other syntactic blockers, while those islands which are not TSL-2 can be distinguished in this regard. Several directions are suggested for future research on islands and other syntactic locality phenomena.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11100203

Authors: Ahmad Awawdeh Doaa K. Riziq Judit Baranyiné Kóczy

This study examines whether gender is associated with both the frequency of codeswitching (CS) and the functions that switching performs in Maghreb Arabic (MA)–French–English trilingual peer talk. Gender-focused studies of CS have more often dealt with frequency, structure, attitudes, or identity than with the communicative work of switches in naturally occurring trilingual interaction. The analysis uses three recordings from a larger corpus: one mixed-gender group, one female-only group, and one male-only group. Together, they include eight speakers (four women and four men), 13,785 words, and 745 coded functional instances classified as pragmatic, semantic, linguistic, or sociocultural. The results show that the normalized CS rates are almost the same for women and men (53.14 and 54.93 functional instances per 1000 words). Speaker-level tests and an exploratory chi-square analysis also find no association between gender and the broad functional distribution, chi-square(3, N = 745) = 0.90, p = 0.825, Cramer’s V = 0.035. Sociocultural and pragmatic functions are the most common in both groups, whereas linguistic functions are rare. The study also reveals that no gender differentiation appears in this subset. Because the sample is small, and gender overlaps with recording context, the findings are descriptive and apply only to the recordings examined.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11100202

Authors: Batkhishig Sangidorj Wuriheng

While previous studies of Mongolian regional dialects have consistently classified the Khövsgöl Buryat language under the category of “Buryat dialects”, no empirical linguistic example has been documented in academic literature. Driven by a research interest in whether the Khövsgöl Buryat heritage language still preserves its Buryat heritage features or has transformed into a variety of the nationally standardized Khalkha dialect as a result of historical and sociopolitical influence, the authors conducted fieldwork in Tsagaan-Üür soum of Khövsgöl province in August 2021 and January–February 2022. Although Tsagaan-Üür has a majority Buryat population, locating and interviewing speakers who actively used the Khövsgöl Buryat heritage language was challenging. Daily life is conducted mostly in Khalkha dialect, and elder speakers who retained knowledge of the Khövsgöl Buryat heritage language were initially reluctant to speak it openly due to the legacy of political repression. This study applied methods for assessing the linguistic and cultural vitality of the Khövsgöl Buryats, documenting endangered languages, and designing language revitalization strategies. Audio and video recordings of linguistic and cultural material were collected, archived, and analyzed to determine the current state of the Khövsgöl Buryat heritage language. In the research participants’ recollections and the terms they used to address each other, many kinship terms appear. These terms are distinguished by a phonological system and semantic shift that indicate male and female referents, and they preserve many linguistic heritages that have disappeared from other regional dialects.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11100201

Authors: José Luis Blas Arroyo

This article examines the role of text types in the diffusion and conditioning of two syntactic changes in the history of Spanish from a comparative variationist perspective. It focuses, first, on the spread of prepositional variants in finite complement clauses dependent on nouns and adjectives in the seventeenth century and, second, on article insertion in oblique relative clauses in the eighteenth century. The analysis draws on corpora representing discourse traditions located at opposite ends of the conceptual continuum between communicative immediacy and distance: ego-documents, literary texts, and legal-administrative documents. Using mixed-effects logistic regression models, the study compares both the frequency of the innovative variants and the linguistic and extralinguistic factors that constrain their selection in each textual domain. The results show that the two changes display different evolutionary profiles. In the first variable, the diffusion and conditioning of the innovative variants are largely similar at both ends of the conceptual axis, which points to convergent trajectories. In the second, by contrast, the spread of the article-bearing variant is more advanced in texts closer to communicative immediacy and shows important differences in conditioning when compared with texts associated with communicative distance. These contrasts appear to be linked both to the different socio-stylistic profiles of the two processes—change from above versus change from below—and to the distinct evolutionary stages they reflect. These findings show that the explanatory weight of text type is not uniform across processes of language change, but varies according to the socio-stylistic profile of the innovation and the developmental stage it has reached. The comparison thus refines the established view of discourse traditions as a relevant dimension of historical change by showing that their effects may range from substantial convergence to clearly differentiated patterns of diffusion and conditioning.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11100200

Authors: Amir Hossein Mardani Azizeh Chalak

Perceptual development of English intonation remains challenging for Iranian EFL learners due to systematic L1–L2 prosodic differences. Adopting a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest control-group design with a sequential mixed-methods component (quantitative measures followed by qualitative interviews to interpret the findings), this study investigates the effects of pitch-range expansion training on Iranian EFL learners’ perception of English question intonation, along with their metalinguistic awareness and experiential reflections. Sixty intermediate learners, homogenized via the Oxford Quick Placement Test, were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. In addition to the regular communicative curriculum, the experimental group underwent a seven-week training intervention (delivered in biweekly 20 min sessions) using Praat (Version 6.3.090) to develop pitch-range perception. Data collection utilized an intonation perception test (pre/post), an Intonation Awareness Questionnaire (IAQ), and semi-structured interviews. Quantitative analyses (ANCOVA and three-factor mixed ANOVA) revealed that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group in overall perception accuracy, with a notably larger improvement for yes/no questions than for wh-questions. Furthermore, the experimental group demonstrated a significant increase in self-reported metalinguistic awareness from pre-test to post-test. Qualitative thematic analysis corroborated these findings, with participants reporting that visual feedback made intonation tangible and helped ease their listening anxiety. These findings highlight the efficacy of visually supported prosodic training in recalibrating L2 perceptual patterns and enhancing metacognitive awareness in EFL contexts.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11100199

Authors: Jan Köpping Eleonora Zani

This paper argues that not-at-issue contents are best analyzed as proposals—similarly, but not identical to, assertions of at-issue contents. This view is justified on theoretical as well as empirical grounds. From a theoretical perspective, we argue that standard accounts of how not-at-issue contents relate to the common ground give rise to significant problems. Empirically, we show that discourse particles such as the German unstressed doch and Italian mica can be used to reject both at-issue and not-at-issue information. Furthermore, Bavarian fei is specialized for challenging not-at-issue material. To account for data like this, we develop a Split Table model that represents at-issue and not-at-issue contents as distinct proposal types with similar yet different properties. This directly derives the differences in the challengeability of at-issue and not-at-issue contents: standard response particles access only at-issue; discourse particles like doch and mica can target both; and fei operates exclusively on not-at-issue proposals. Our analysis thus provides a unified account of how different content types are proposed, negotiated, and accommodated in conversation.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11100198

Authors: Shiyang Zheng Lin Fan Qingxu Zhai Jiao Zhang Rong Wei

Lexical inferencing (LIF) draws on multiple knowledge sources (KSs), but little is known about how the same multilingual readers report using these sources across different reading tasks. This exploratory study examined 31 Chinese–English–Japanese trilinguals who completed think-aloud inferencing tasks in three language-and-material conditions. Nine KS Types were coded, and trial-level ordinal mixed-effects models related KS use to rater-coded LIF success and participant-selected immediate Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (VKS) categories. Sentence Meaning was the most frequently reported KS Type in all three conditions, while several word-level KS Types and co-occurrence patterns varied across conditions. KS Amount was not associated with LIF success. The joint KS Type test produced weak, threshold-sensitive evidence, and no individual KS Type contrast survived multiplicity correction. VKS categories differed across conditions but were not consistently associated with LIF success, KS Amount, KS Type, or exploratory co-occurrence measures. Because language was confounded with texts, target sets, target status, proficiency, and language experience, between-condition contrasts are descriptive and cannot isolate language or transfer effects. The findings question a simple ‘more is better’ account of reported KS use and identify descriptive patterns for testing in future matched-material studies.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11100197

Authors: Yue Sun Ariadna Sánchez-Hernández

When speakers encounter errors or misunderstandings in others’ talk, how they respond carries both pragmatic and interpersonal consequences that vary systematically across languages and cultures, yet this area remains underexplored in cross-cultural pragmatic research. This study examines how native speakers of English, Spanish, and Chinese respond to communication trouble across comparable sociopragmatic situations, and how social distance and social status shape these responses. Data were elicited from 124 L1 speakers of English, Spanish, and Chinese using an online Discourse Completion Task (DCT) and analysed using a pragmatics-oriented framework distinguishing three main types of responses: remediation, trouble-signalling, and let-it-pass. Results show that all three groups preferred remediation, particularly indirect remediation, reflecting a shared concern for managing the face-threatening potential of addressing others’ problems. The groups diverged most sharply in their use of let-it-pass, with Chinese and English speakers leaving trouble unaddressed far more often than Spanish speakers. Social status emerged as a more robust and cross-linguistically consistent factor than social distance, with remediation more frequently selected in high-status contexts across all three groups. These findings provide a cross-cultural reference point for L2 pragmatic instruction, particularly for learners whose L1 norms diverge most sharply from the target language in managing communicative trouble.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11090196

Authors: Elena Gavruseva

This article presents a longitudinal case study of want-constructions in an English–Russian bilingual child whose early language was characterized by prolonged pronoun reversal (i.e., using you for self-reference). The analysis focuses on want-constructions used during a period in which canonical English imperatives were not documented (e.g., want tear it). Drawing on detailed diary records (ages 2;8–5;5), the study examines the morphosyntactic forms of these constructions and their discourse–pragmatic functions. The findings show that the child used want-constructions to express a range of directive meanings, including requests, prohibitions, and counterfactual wishes. Their morphosyntax became increasingly complex over time, with the emergence of overt matrix subjects, infinitival marking, and verbal morphology. However, greater morphosyntactic complexity did not automatically trigger adult-like subject-control relations in complements of want; the interpretation of null embedded subjects often remained dependent on discourse context. The study argues that volitional want-predicates served as a lexically anchored alternative to canonical imperatives during a period of pronoun reversal. Their development may reflect the interaction of discourse-functional, usage-based, and crosslinguistic factors. The findings highlight the need to investigate the development of directive strategies in both bilingual and monolingual children with pronoun reversals.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11090195

Authors: Ai Sumirah Setiawati Fathur Rokhman Ida Zulaeha Rina Supriatnanigsih

Developing Japanese writing ability as a second language (L2) requires learners to simultaneously manage linguistic, cognitive, and metacognitive resources. Although the Think Aloud Protocol (TAP) has been widely employed to access writers’ cognitive processes, its pedagogical impact on L2 Japanese writing remains underexplored. This study investigates the effects of TAP on the writing performance of Indonesian learners of Japanese at the A2–B1 proficiency levels, as defined by the Japan Foundation Standard (JF Standard), by examining both group-level performance changes and individual developmental trajectories. Using a convergent mixed-methods case study design, data were collected from 30 university students across three writing sessions (90 compositions): Pre-TAP, TAP-1, and TAP-2. Quantitative analysis revealed a gradual increase of 12.7% in mean scores from Pre-TAP to TAP-2. However, the overall difference across the three sessions did not reach statistical significance (Friedman χ2(2) = 5.447, p = 0.066). The mean improvement from Pre-TAP to TAP-2 was 1.37 points (95% CI [0.33, 2.43]), although the difference was not significant after Holm correction (adjusted p = 0.100). Nonetheless, individual-level analysis demonstrated divergent performance trajectories, including improvement, stability, and decline. These findings suggest that TAP functions differently across learners, serving as cognitive scaffolding for some, while imposing cognitive pressure and providing diagnostic value by revealing vulnerabilities in L2 writing skills for others.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11090194

Authors: Mari Kendla Mari-Liis Kalvik

Official month names in Estonian and other Finnic languages (except for Finnish), as well as in many other languages, originate from Latin. In addition to these, folk names are also used; these date back to long before the emergence of the Christian calendar and currently appear as parallel variants in calendars, fiction, and specialised literature. The aim of this study is to provide a comprehensive overview of Finnic folk month names, their distribution, structure, origin, and naming principles. To achieve this, an extensive body of material was analysed, ranging from the earliest documentations of folk month names to contemporary treatments, while also incorporating all available dictionaries, lexicons, archival materials, and similar sources. The article examines the underlying reasons for these specific month names, whether they overlap across different languages, whether regional variations emerge based on cultural background, and how they have evolved over time. The study reveals that folk month names in Finnic languages can exhibit a high degree of semantic overlap, as they are based on the same naming principles. Furthermore, names related to nature and labour are predominantly indigenous, whereas those derived from feast days contain a substantial proportion of loanwords. To facilitate a better understanding of word formation, the paper also addresses the history of time reckoning and the events that have influenced the naming of months.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11090193

Authors: Yeongeun Choi Stephan Schmid Eva Maria Luef

The phonetic realization of word-initial stops used to diverge between Austrian and Swiss Standard German, and neither pattern closely aligned with that of German Standard German (GSG). Recently, however, it has been reported to be undergoing change in both varieties. Of particular interest is that this change has unfolded in the same direction, converging on realizations characteristic of GSG, despite two key differences: (1) the two standard varieties differed in their realization of aspiration in the stop contrast (scarcely vs. variably aspirated fortis stops) and (2) Austrian German and Swiss German have evolved within different linguistic repertoires, each associated with distinct pathways of sound change. Based on read speech data from ten university students in each country, the present study investigated the ongoing phonetic differentiation of initial stops in the two national varieties and the cross-repertoire effects on this change. Results showed that Austrian and Swiss speakers actively employed voice onset time to signal the contrast of initial stops, without relying on closure duration. Yet, Austrian speakers patterned more closely with German speakers than did Swiss speakers. Sociolinguistically, Austrian speakers appear to regard the oral standard of GSG as an upper-standard variety relative to Austrian Standard German, whereas Swiss speakers may treat it as an oral standard newly incorporated into the traditionally written-centric standard variety.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11090192

Authors: Wen Lu

In this paper, we discuss topicalization comparatives, an underrecognized subtype within the Heinean event-schema framework. Drawing on data from Nyanja, Malay, and Sinitic languages, the analysis corroborates the existence of a construction marked by a fronted topic with an obligatory standard of comparison and an optional comparee. Topicalization creates a cognitive domain that facilitates contrast between the standard of comparison and the comparee, with prosodic cues or an overt topic and/or comment marker. Furthermore, two formal subtypes of topicalization comparative construction are distinguished: a fuller form aligning with Heine’s prototype and a reduced variant observed in Wu and Hui Sinitic, wherein topic–comment ordering reinforced by prosody enables a contrastive reading between the standard and the comparee. Despite the centrality of topicalization, its cross-linguistic distribution remains limited; as a matter of fact, not all topic-prominent languages employ this schema, due to internal competition among cognitive strategies and external pressure from standard languages. These findings underscore the marginal status of topicalization comparatives in a global typological perspective. The study contributes empirical evidence from under-documented Sinitic varieties and points to the need for broader cross-linguistic investigation into the competition among alternative cognitive schemas in shaping comparative constructions in topic-prominent languages.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11090190

Authors: Jinhong Liu Angeliek van Hout Hamida Demirdache

This paper investigates how Mandarin-speaking children acquire event culmination in causative change-of-state verbs, focusing on the contrast between resultative verb compounds (RVCs; e.g., shā-sǐ ‘kill-dead’), which entail culmination, and monomorphemic causative verbs (e.g., shā ‘kill’), which trigger a cancellable culmination inference. We provide the first acquisition study of two factors argued to license non-culminating interpretations in the adult grammar: agent control and aspectual coercion induced by time adverbials such as hǎojǐcì ‘several times’. Across three experiments, 3-year-olds, 5-year-olds, and adults judged perfective-marked sentences describing culminating and non-culminating events. The results revealed a clear developmental progression. Three-year-olds failed to distinguish between RVCs and monomorphemic causative verbs, accepting non-culminating interpretations for both verb classes. By contrast, 5-year-olds correctly rejected non-culminating interpretations of RVCs, demonstrating acquisition of the culmination entailment associated with these forms, but over-rejected non-culminating interpretations of monomorphemic causative verbs. Our findings suggest that the acquisition challenge posed by Mandarin causative verbs lies not only in learning the distinction between entailed vs. defeasible (i.e., cancellable) inferences, but also in the conditions under which culmination inferences may be suspended. While children are sensitive to aspectual coercion (the presence of hǎojǐcì ‘several times’ substantially increased acceptance of non-culminating interpretations across all age groups), they show little sensitivity to the distinction between agentive vs. non-agentive causation—a factor which plays a critical role in licensing non-culminating construals in the adult grammar. More broadly, this study provides new evidence on how children acquire the interaction between lexical semantics, event structure, and pragmatic inference in the domain of causative verbs.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11090191

Authors: Jüri Viikberg

The article provides an overview of the introduction of German loanwords into the Estonian language from the 13th to the 20th century, as well as their spread in Standard Estonian and dialects. German has functioned as a donor language in both its Low German and High German forms; however, Estonian has also had two written standards based on its major dialects—the Tallinn and Tartu literary languages, which were developed on the basis of the North Estonian and South Estonian main dialects. When comparing dialect areas and borrowing periods, a continuity of borrowing becomes evident, where a High German loanword appears either in place of or alongside an earlier Low German loanword. The widespread diffusion of Low German neologisms in Estonian dialects at the time is evidence that they entered the Estonian language predominantly through spoken communication. In comparison, a key difference in the case of High German loanwords is that these new terms were mainly added via the written language.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11090189

Authors: Vladislava Warditz Aimgul Kazkenova Zhanar Bekturganova

This study examines resultativity in Kazakh as a linguistic marker of nativeness by comparing diasporic speakers exposed to the social pressures of dominant languages with speakers in Kazakhstan, where the ongoing revitalization of Kazakh is reshaping its use. Nativeness is conceptualised as a linguistic construct referring to speakers’ command of a salient and typologically distinctive grammatical feature of Kazakh, namely resultative auxiliary verb constructions. As a gradient phenomenon shaped by intergenerational language transmission, nativeness is relevant both to migrant communities and to the multilingual homeland. During the Soviet era, many Kazakh speakers experienced a shift to Russian as their first language, resulting in a broad spectrum of proficiency in Kazakh, including gradual attrition of core grammatical domains. This development makes homeland speakers affected by language shift comparable to diasporic speakers. When adopting this innovative research perspective, we investigate how these divergent sociolinguistic trajectories are reflected in the use of resultative auxiliary verb constructions, a salient and structurally sensitive domain. To address the two multilingual settings—the diaspora and the homeland—we adopt a quantitative, cross-sectional design comparing four groups: L1 Kazakh speakers (n = 32), L1 Russian speakers with L2 Kazakh (n = 30), Russian–Kazakh speakers in Kazakhstan, whose L1 Kazakh was replaced by Russian during socialisation (n = 33), and Kazakh diaspora speakers across different countries (n = 30), the latter constituting the central analytical focus. The results based on a multiple-choice sentence-completion task demonstrate that the use of resultative auxiliary verb constructions reflects varying degrees of nativeness across contexts. In Kazakhstan, L1 Kazakh speakers exhibit the highest stability, while Russian–Kazakh bilinguals display variability consistent with Russian influence yet outperform L2 learners. In the diaspora, speakers show comparatively high stability in resultative marking, pointing to substantial maintenance despite pressure from dominant societal languages. At the same time, subtle variability points to localised contact-induced optionality in specific grammatical contexts rather than widespread restructuring. Overall, the findings identify resultativity as a sensitive diagnostic of language maintenance and change, capturing both revitalization dynamics in the homeland and adaptive processes in diaspora settings.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11090188

Authors: Basant S. M. Moustafa

Since its intensification in the early 2000s, Saudization, perceived as Saudi Arabia’s labor nationalization policy, has profoundly shaped the socio-economic and socio-political discourse in the Arab world. In spite of the extensive policy and economic research on Saudization, it remains linguistically underexplored, particularly through corpus-based analysis of Arabic language discourse. The current study, hence, investigates the collocational patterns of the term “Sa’wadah” (the transliterated Arabic language equivalent of “Saudization”) in a mega-corpus of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) with the aim of sketching its semantic prosodies and working towards the ideological representations permeating through its collocates. To this end, using the methodological synergy of Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics, the Arabic corpus (arTenTen24) integrated within the online interface of Sketch Engine is scrutinized to extract a statistically significant collocational profile for Saudization and work out its semantic prosodies and their ideological representations. The findings show that the collocational profile of Saudization can be categorized into institutional, economic and evaluative topic domains. Second, the semantic prosodies associated with the term are mainly mixed, with a slight tendency towards negative and critical evaluation. Third, the ideological representations of Saudizations in MSA discourse are marked by ambivalence: the policy is constructed as a national duty whose implementation is a contested practice.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11090187

Authors: Marilyn M. Vihman Christopher M. M. Cox

Production and perception of speech develop in tandem during the first year of life, shaping one another in ways that have only recently been experimentally tested. Canonical babbling, which emerges robustly between 6 and 8 months across languages, is grounded in neuromotor maturation but also depends critically on audition. To account for how production experience might shape word learning, in 1993 Vihman proposed an ‘articulatory filter’ that spotlights adult speech patterns that match an infant’s emerging motor routines. This review traces this proposal to its origins and summarizes the experimental evidence from the past 15 years, much of it using Vocal Motor Schemes (VMS)—frequent, stable consonantal patterns identified from naturalistic recordings—as an index of phonetic mastery. Studies employing VMS demonstrate that infants’ production patterns modulate their attention to and memory for both nonwords and familiar words, and that earlier VMS attainment predicts later lexical and phonological outcomes. Recent acoustic work has begun to validate the VMS construct, while parallel lines of research extend the logic to the pre-canonical period and to infants’ attraction to the sound of infant voices, especially their own. With further validation, VMS may serve as an early clinical indicator of vocabulary delay.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11090186

Authors: Petri Kallio

The present article will discuss the diachronic background of the six Estonian proto-dialects: South Estonian, Coastal Estonian (proper), Vaivara (Coastal) Estonian, East Estonian, Northeast Estonian, and (remaining) North Estonian. Since the author has already extensively discussed the three former groups before, special reference will be given to the three latter ones.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11090185

Authors: Evar Saar Sulev Iva

South Estonian has traditionally been classified in Estonian dialectology as a dialect group of Estonian, whereas historical-comparative linguistics has increasingly recognised it as an early-diverging Finnic language. At the same time, its contemporary varieties—Võro, Seto, Mulgi, and Tartu—have followed different sociolinguistic trajectories and are increasingly regarded by their speakers as separate languages. This article presents a conceptual synthesis and qualitative comparative analysis of evidence from historical-comparative linguistics, dialectology, sociolinguistics, and language planning in order to re-evaluate the relationship between historical South Estonian and its contemporary varieties. It argues that South Estonian is best understood as a historical Abstand language, while Võro, Seto, Mulgi, and Tartu are more appropriately regarded as its contemporary daughter languages. This framework reconciles genealogical classification with present-day sociolinguistic realities and provides a more coherent basis for language classification, language standardisation, language planning, and language revitalisation.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11090184

Authors: Jiawei Shi Lihui Zhang Yurong Li Jing Li Peng Zhou

The article investigates children’s agent-first bias in sentence comprehension. Agent-first bias refers to the phenomenon in which children (or adults) tend to assign the agent role to the first noun phrase (NP) in a sentence. Previous studies suggest that children acquiring Indo-European languages like English exhibit the agent-first bias from early on, while children acquiring other languages may do so only during later stages of language development. However, little is understood about whether children acquiring Mandarin, a language with distinct typological features, also exhibit the agent-first bias. To fill this gap, we conducted two studies to examine children’s thematic role assignment in Mandarin noun–verb (NV) constructions and BEI-passive constructions. In the corpus study, our analysis of the child-directed utterances showed that for NV constructions, the NPs appeared more often as agents than patients, while for BEI-passive constructions, the NPs consistently served as patients. In the experimental study, we examined how 3- to 5-year-old children comprehended the two constructions, using a picture selection task. The results were consistent with the corpus findings. More specifically, when comprehending NV constructions, children as young as age 3 exhibited the agent-first bias, and this bias was stronger in the older children and adults. By contrast, when comprehending BEI-passive constructions, the children tended to interpret the NPs as patients. Taken together, these findings indicate a developmental trajectory of the agent-first bias in Mandarin-speaking children. We discuss these findings in relation to typological features across languages as well as the potential influences of input information and the passive marker BEI on children’s thematic role assignment.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11090183

Authors: Mariko Faster Helen Plado

This study examines reading opportunities and practices in the Võro and Seto languages in the context of ongoing language shift and limited intergenerational transmission. Literacy in local languages is important for language revitalisation. Minority-language literacy, especially where majority-language societies have high literacy, expands the functional domains of the language, enhances its prestige, and provides additional input for language learning, especially where oral transmission is weakening. The aim of the study is to map existing reading opportunities in Võro and Seto (including books, newspapers, magazines, and social media) and to analyse how these resources are used, with particular attention to reading activities involving children and the reasons for non-use. The study is based on a survey conducted via LimeSurvey in 2025 among adults. The questionnaire included 36 questions covering demographics, language use, reading habits, and cultural participation. The results show that reading opportunities in Võro and Seto are primarily based on two newspapers, books and social media content. Respondents who have studied these languages in courses or at school demonstrate better reading skills. Võro and Seto proficiency is present in society, and reading in these languages is gradually improving. In contrast, reading aloud to children emerges as a potentially important but underused practice. Children’s limited reading ability is partly related to insufficient language proficiency. The findings suggest that reading aloud to children and book reading among adults may contribute to language maintenance and function as mechanisms for language revitalisation.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11090182

Authors: Zuzanna Cal

This study analyses the production of voiceless and voiced plosives (/p, t, k, b, d, g/) in both read and spontaneous speech produced by L1 Polish, L2 English, L3 Norwegian multilingual learners and native control speakers. The goal is to examine whether L2/L3 learners maintain distinct phonological categories in all their languages or exhibit cross-linguistic influence, as well as to identify which voicing series and places of articulation are most susceptible to the interference. Moreover, the study seeks to integrate acoustic data with extralinguistic factors, such as proficiency, exposure, frequency of use and age of acquisition, to provide a deeper understanding of the dynamic coexistence of three phonological systems both in controlled and more authentic environments. The study reveals significant L1 and L3 influence on L2 stop production, especially in the voiced series of stops, and more target-like L1 and L3 production.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11090181

Authors: Liumao Zhong

This paper argues that nominal domains in Mandarin Chinese instantiate phases and exhibit the characteristic asymmetry between edge and complement. Evidence comes from both binding asymmetry and raising asymmetry. A possessor can bind the logophor ziji only when it occupies the highest position within the nominal domain, indicating that only this position is accessible to higher discourse-related structure. In addition, possessor raising is sensitive to the A/A’ status of the nominal edge, and therefore indicates successive-cyclic movement through the nominal edge. These findings reveal a robust asymmetry within the nominal domain: elements at the edge remain visible to higher operations, while those within the complement domain are inaccessible. This pattern supports the conclusion that Mandarin nominals constitute phases.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11090180

Authors: Dinara Tlepbergen Assel Akzhigitova Anastassia Zabrodskaja

This study examines children’s language use in spontaneous playground interaction in Kazakhstan, focusing on how language choice varies across play activities and how these practices relate to family language orientations. The study uses non-participant observation and audio recordings of nine playgroup sessions involving 23 children aged 4–9, complemented by caregiver questionnaires. The analysis follows an interactional approach and uses qualitative coding in MAXQDA. The findings show variability in language use across the observed play sessions and communicative functions. In cooperative and structured play, Kazakh accounted for the largest proportion of coded utterances in both observed sessions, whereas competitive and physically oriented play showed a more variable distribution of Kazakh, Russian, and mixed-language utterances. At the utterance level, the strongest co-occurrence patterns for Kazakh were observed with agreement, initiation, and negotiation, whereas Russian showed stronger co-occurrence with accusation, claim, and protest. Comparison with caregiver reports shows partial correspondence between reported family language practices and observed playground language use, suggesting that peer language practices are not simply direct reflections of family language orientations. From a language policy perspective, the study shows that playgrounds constitute an important site where state and family language policy are enacted and negotiated in everyday practice. By focusing on children’s agency in informal peer settings, the study contributes to research on family language policy, language socialization, and language policy “from below”.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11090179

Authors: Katharina Korecky-Kröll Anja Wittibschlager Amelie Dorn

Greeting and farewell formulae are highly conventionalized routines that index social relations, regional norms and situational formality. This paper investigates pragmatic variation in greetings and farewells in rural Austria, focusing on age, region, setting and prosodic design. We analyze greeting and farewell formulae and metalinguistic comments produced by 152 adults from 13 rural locations across two project phases. The dataset combines spontaneous interactions with controlled elicitations in two greeting experiments contrasting a formal urban service encounter and an informal local dialect encounter. In spontaneous greetings, the supraregional call formula hallo predominates and is significantly rarer among older speakers. Across age groups, participants strongly preferred grüß Gott in the formal urban store scenario and griaß di in the informal local bakery scenario. Pronominal address is largely avoided, with T forms restricted mainly to western locations and familiar contexts. Prosodically, participants use [ˈhalo] and [haˈloː] at similar rates, whereas interviewers strongly favor the marked variant [haˈloː], suggesting different interactional roles in greeting management. Older speakers produce significantly more metalinguistic comments, revealing a mismatch between politeness ideologies and recorded practice. Overall, the findings reveal age-graded and context-dependent patterns of pragmatic variation in rural Austria.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11090178

Authors: Van Hong Nghiem Lan Anh Thi Nguyen Nam Hoang Tran

Technical intern trainees (TITs) preparing to depart for Japan study Japanese within a compressed four- to six-month pre-departure period, during which they must acquire language skills for workplace communication, daily life, and social adaptation. This cross-sectional study examined Japanese-learning challenges and technology use among Vietnam’s Japan-bound TITs, with working adults studying Japanese in Vietnam included as an unmatched descriptive benchmark rather than as a matched control group. Data were collected through an online self-administered questionnaire using snowball sampling. The study relied on self-reported data from 91 Vietnamese Japanese-language learners, including TITs (n = 44) enrolled in preparatory courses at training centers in Hanoi and working adults (n = 47) from diverse professional backgrounds. Overall, 57.1% of respondents reported high technology use, defined as using online tools for Japanese learning daily or multiple times daily. Smartphones were the dominant learning device, while YouTube, Mazii, ChatGPT, and social media were the most frequently used platforms. Technology was used mainly for vocabulary, listening, grammar, and Kanji learning. Major challenges included difficulty with Kanji, complex grammar structures, similar grammar patterns, unclear learning pathways, lack of correction or feedback, and distraction during self-study. Several learning-behavior variables showed associations with high technology use in unadjusted analyses, but these associations did not remain statistically significant after correction for multiple comparisons. Exploratory regression suggested a possible relationship between perceived effectiveness and high technology use, although the estimate was imprecise. The findings suggest that technology-supported Japanese learning for TITs may benefit from moving beyond scattered use of digital tools toward mobile-friendly, structured, feedback-rich learning pathways aligned with practical workplace and daily-life communication needs in Japan.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11090177

Authors: Shu Yang Jidong Chen

Discourse-information structure has been found to shape the realization of verb argument structure. This study investigates the effects of grammatical roles, information status, and animacy of verb arguments on verb argument realization in the speech of Mandarin-speaking children, in comparison with that of their caregivers. The data are drawn from two naturalistic longitudinal corpora of two monolingual Mandarin-learning children (ages 1;07–3;09). All verb arguments were coded for core grammatical roles (Agent, Subject, Object), information status (given vs. new), and animacy (animate vs. inanimate). The results indicate that both child and adult speech generally conform to PAS: the preferred quantity of lexical arguments or new information is no more than one, new and lexical arguments tend to often occur in the Object role, and Agents tend to be given and non-lexical. Children’s and caregivers’ speech are thus shaped by similar discourse-pragmatic factors, though adherence to some constraints varies across dyads and constraints, likely reflecting differences in interactional contexts, caregiver input, and children’s developmental status. These findings suggest that Mandarin-acquiring children are sensitive to discourse-pragmatic constraints in argument realization from early on, aligning with discourse-pragmatic probabilistic approaches to language acquisition.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11090176

Authors: Margherita Di Salvo

This case study investigates specific language phenomena and dominance patterns among second-generation speakers of Sri Lankan origin in Naples within the framework of the HELLO Campania Project. While second generations are typically assumed to be dominant in the societal majority language, the Sri Lankan community—characterized by exceptionally high rates of heritage language maintenance—offers a critical testing ground for this assumption. Drawing on a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews with first- and second-generation speakers, the analysis focuses on two morphosyntactic variables that function as indicators of acquisitional development in Italian as L2: verbal morphology and the realization of definite and indefinite articles. Verbal forms were classified along a four-stage developmental scale derived from research on Italian interlanguage, while article use was evaluated through a three-level accuracy scale. Descriptive and inferential statistics reveal a clear asymmetry within the second generation specifically in terms of gender variable. Male speakers display near-native competence consistent with the expected dominance shift toward Italian. In contrast, several female speakers exhibit persistent features—such as infinitive overextension, auxiliary omission in perfective constructions, and residual article omission—patterns more typical of first stages of second-language acquisition than of heritage-speaker dominance. These findings suggest that, in contexts of strong heritage language maintenance and dense ethnic social networks, second-generation speakers may experience incomplete acquisition of the majority language rather than incomplete acquisition of the heritage language. Methodologically, the study demonstrates the importance of integrating perceptual self-reports with production data. Theoretically, it challenges universalist assumptions about second-generation dominance and underscores the need for community-specific, migration-scenario-based analyses in heritage language research.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11090175

Authors: Emily Jo Noschese Chao Wang

This quantitative study explores divergent beliefs about word order in American Sign Language (ASL) within the U.S. Deaf community. Although the academic literature commonly characterizes ASL as following a Subject–Verb–Object (SVO) structure, certain Deaf individuals maintain that ASL predominantly uses a Subject–Object–Verb (SOV) order. This perception reflects an ideological positioning of ASL as fundamentally distinct from English and may align with community norms that have historically emphasized SOV structures. Data were collected through an acceptability judgment task with 53 varied sentence structures presented via video. Among 86 Deaf participants, distinct preferences emerged based on ASL acquisition background. Participants with early ASL exposure from Deaf parents preferred the SOV structure, while those with early ASL exposure from hearing parents preferred the SVO structure. This finding suggests that variability in beliefs about acceptable ASL word order, along with factors such as early language exposure and parental input, influences judgments of acceptability.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11080174

Authors: Mehmet-Ali Akinci

According to recent estimates, France is home to approximately 700,000 individuals of Turkish origin, encompassing first-, second-, and third-generation immigrants. Scholars have extensively investigated the language practices, maintenance, and shift, as well as the cultural practices and identity construction, of Turkish migrant families in France, employing both sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic approaches. However, the majority of these studies have examined family members in isolation, focusing separately on young children, adolescents, or parents. The present study aims to investigate language use, choice, and maintenance, as well as identity construction, across three generations of Turkish immigrants in France. Data were collected from two Turkish families, one in the Rouen region and the other in the Paris region: the first family consists of a father, his daughter, and his granddaughter, while the second family includes a mother, her daughter, and her granddaughter. To do this, we used questionnaires and semi-structured interviews tailored to each of the three generations. The data were subsequently analyzed through content analysis. The paper addresses the following interconnected research questions: (i) What intergenerational differences exist within the same family regarding language use and choice, as well as linguistic competence in L1 (Turkish) and L2 (French)? (ii) How do bilinguals’ language choices and usage relate to the construction of family members’ identities? (iii) Is there evidence of language attrition among third-generation immigrants? (iv) Is there evidence of an ongoing language shift toward L2 within Turkish families? The findings indicate robust maintenance of Turkish, even among the third generation. While the first generation predominantly uses Turkish, both the second and third generations identify themselves as bilingual and exhibit positive attitudes toward both languages.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11080173

Authors: Cleo Condoravdi Paul Kiparsky

We propose a new account of the change from -Vsis, -Vzis to -Vi̯s in Modern Lesbian, as well as of related changes in other Northern Greek dialects, arguing that they are special cases of the loss of unstressed high vowels. Our analysis depends on the new understanding of the nature of sound change that nonlinear phonology and Optimality Theory jointly make available.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11080172

Authors: Brian D. Joseph

The Greek dialects of Lesvos and Adrianople (present-day Edirne) during the time of the Ottoman Empire have much in common. Both are northern dialects and show considerable influence from Turkish; moreover, both were documented in the early 20th century, before the fall of the Ottoman Empire, by Kretschmer, in 1905, for Lesvos and by Ronzevalle, in 1911, for Adrianople. A comparative look at the two dialects reveals deep penetration of Turkish into their respective lexicons, with consequences for their phonology, and for Adrianople, into aspects of its grammar too. I focus here on a phonological matter, namely the conditions under which voiced stops (D) occur. Kretschmer’s song recordings from Lesvos show D only after full nasals (N), i.e., in ND clusters, while later documentation, Newton 1972, shows no nasality, with only D as the realization, even in words with ND earlier. Adrianople Greek shows intervocalic D but also ND clusters, only in Turkish loans and always matching the consonantism of the Turkish source; such is the case too in ND/D variation in rebetika songs from Istanbul. This suggests that the issue really involves a kind of dialect mixing, and it is argued that this holds even for Lesvos, and even for sociolinguistically coded variation. Thus, bringing Adrianople Greek into consideration clarifies the nature of voiced stop realizations in Lesvos phonology.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11080171

Authors: Ana Yara Postigo-Fuentes Jose Bernardo Berna Alvarado

This article analyses how three leading female figures of the European far right—Marine Le Pen (France), Giorgia Meloni (Italy), and Alice Weidel (Germany)—construct populist discourse on X (formerly Twitter) during recent high-stakes election campaigns. The analysis is based on a corpus of 1053 posts published in the month preceding the 2022 French presidential elections, the 2022 Italian general elections, and the 2025 German federal elections. Methodologically, it combines content analysis (operationalised through a codebook developed in Atlas.ti v23), Critical Discourse Analysis, and comparative analysis to identify dominant issues, campaign strategies, and underlying discursive structures. Adopting a corpus-pragmatic perspective, the study undertakes a pragmatic examination of implicit meaning—presupposition, implication, and implicature—to show how meaning is conveyed in authentic, digitally mediated political data. The findings reveal a shared populist communicative matrix centred on polarisation, simplification, and emotional mobilisation, alongside important national variations. Le Pen and Meloni primarily construct an “internal traitor” among political elites, linking economic and social grievances to elite failure. In contrast, Weidel recentres migration and security, portraying migrants as a direct threat and mainstream parties as responsible for citizens’ insecurity. The article highlights the need for further research on gender and leadership in the contemporary European far right.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11080170

Authors: Ilaria Fiorentini

This paper focuses on historical and new linguistic minorities in educational contexts in Italy. It argues that, despite increasing multilingualism, the Italian educational system remains shaped by a persistent monolingual ideology. Drawing on data from two research projects, La classe plurilingue (2018–2020) and MinEdu—Supporting Minority Languages in Educational Contexts (2023–2026), it examines how different forms of multilingualism, both of which can be framed within a heritage language profile, are managed across educational settings. The analysis highlights a fundamental asymmetry: while historical minority languages are institutionally recognized but internally contested (particularly with respect to standardization), languages associated with migration are largely marginalized. The paper argues that both phenomena can be understood within a broader ideological framework described as “monolingualism within multilingualism”, and calls for a rethinking of language education policies in Italy.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11080169

Authors: Nala H. Lee Chuen-Shin Yong Miguel Escobar Varela

Language vitality scales are commonly used in language documentation, yet assumptions behind labels such as “threatened” and “endangered” are often taken for granted. This study adopts a computational-based approach to disciplinary discourse analysis, examining how linguists deploy “threatened” and “endangered,” terms that appear on vitality scales, across scholarly discourse. We compared vocabulary and thematic content in “threatened” and “endangered” texts using TF-IDF, topic modeling, and similarity metrics, with other linguistic terms providing contextual benchmarks. Keyword analysis shows that “threatened” and “endangered” index related but distinct orientations within linguistic research. Writing on “endangered” languages more frequently centers on documentation, archiving, and institutional research practices, while writing on “threatened” languages places greater emphasis on language vitality and ongoing sociolinguistic change. The magnitude of their difference is contextualized by contrasting “threatened” and “endangered” with other conceptual pairs within linguistics and beyond. The findings suggest that “threatened” and “endangered”, which are consecutive labels on the Language Endangerment Index, are more closely related than distinct theoretical constructs but less related than near-overlapping linguistic terms. Overall, the results demonstrate that these terms, as deployed in disciplinary practice, capture systematic distinctions in how linguistic situations are understood. Methodologically, this paper shows how computational analysis can be used as a reflexive research tool that enables us to better understand disciplinary discourse.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11080168

Authors: Oksana Laleko Tanya Ivanova-Sullivan

Research on Russian as a heritage language has played a central role in the development of heritage language studies [...]

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11080167

Authors: Kexin Zhang João Veloso

Can listeners whose native language lacks contrastive lexical stress identify stress in an unfamiliar language? We addressed this question with native Mandarin Chinese listeners, whose L1 marks lexical contrasts with tone, and European Portuguese (EP), whose stress system relies mainly on vowel-quality and durational cues. Twenty listeners with no knowledge of Portuguese heard 30 trisyllabic EP words and indicated, for each word, which syllable sounded most prominent. Overall accuracy was modestly but reliably above chance (46.9%; chance = 33.3%), but it was carried almost entirely by words with initial (antepenultimate) stress, and responses showed a strong overall preference for the initial syllable. Once this positional bias was modeled explicitly, relative duration was the only reliable acoustic predictor of listeners’ responses, with an additional contribution of syllable weight, whereas F0 and intensity showed no independent effects; the durational effect was robust to controlling for intrinsic vowel duration. These findings indicate partial, but clearly non-native-like, sensitivity to EP prominence: listeners recruited duration, a prominence cue productive in Mandarin and the main lexical cue remaining in EP for listeners who cannot exploit vowel-quality contrasts, while apparently disregarding F0, which their L1 binds to lexical tone. The results bear on the debate about prominence in Mandarin and show, methodologically, that positional response biases must be modeled before cue weighting can be interpreted.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11080166

Authors: Alícia Paulet-Prats Lluís Barceló-Coblijn Elga Cremades

This study examines the use of function words in adult individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) compared to typically developing (TD) speakers, focusing on spontaneous speech in Catalan and Spanish. The aim is to assess both quantitative and qualitative aspects of function word production and to explore whether WS is associated with distinct grammatical processing patterns. The corpus consisted of 20 five-minute transcripts, equally divided by language (Catalan/Spanish) and group (WS/TD). Analyses included counts of function word categories, error types, and mean length of utterance in morphemes (MLUm). Statistical procedures (t-tests, ANOVA, Mann–Whitney tests, and MANOVA with bootstrapping) were applied depending on distributional assumptions. Results showed significant differences between WS and TD groups in several categories, including prepositions, conjunctions, definite articles, numerals, adverbs, and relative pronouns, with large effect sizes in some cases. MLUm was also significantly lower in the WS group. In contrast, no significant effects of language or interaction between language and group were found. These findings indicate that WS has a robust impact on grammatical usage, particularly affecting function words, independently of language. On the whole, the results support the view that WS is associated with atypical linguistic profiles and contribute cross-linguistic evidence from Romance languages, highlighting the need for further research on language processing in this population.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11080165

Authors: Philipp Stöckle Markus Pluschkovits

This paper investigates variation on the level of lexis in Austrian German across registers with an apparent-time approach, drawing on data from a large-scale online survey of lexical variation conducted across Austria between 2021 and 2023, comprising 45 lexical concepts elicited from over 1900 respondents. We utilize Shannon entropy as a proxy to model lexical diversity across different registers in young and old speakers and investigate the influence of area, age group, phenomenon and register. We use ANOVA, multi-dimensional scaling and generalized additive modelling and find that the lexical concept under investigation exerts by far the strongest influence on lexical diversity, followed by a small but significant regional effect—one that, however, disappears when modelled at the level of individual localities rather than aggregated regions. While area influences lexical diversity, we do not find evidence of clearly distinguished lexical isoglosses in our data but rather broad east–west distinctions. While we find more diversity in older speakers in their nonstandard, we observe more pronounced east–west distinctions in younger speakers. We interpret this as a levelling of standard and nonstandard forms in younger speakers but along broader regional lines. This is corroborated by the reduced diversity in younger speakers in nonstandard varieties but slightly higher diversity in standard registers, pointing towards a levelling process.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11080164

Authors: Lorraine D. Reggin Janelle M. Wydeven Susan A. Graham Penny M. Pexman

LENA StartTM is a community-based parent education program designed to promote early language development in children from birth to 3 years of age. In this study, the contributions of three intervention components—home recordings, individualized feedback, and parent education—were examined over 10 weeks across three groups: LENA StartTM program (n = 347), Recordings + Feedback (n = 66), and Recordings Only (n = 51). Linear mixed-effects models were used to examine change over time, group differences, and group differences in trajectories while accounting for baseline values and child characteristics. There were improvements in child language, as measured by the parent-reported LENA® Developmental Snapshot, across measurement periods for all groups, whereas parent-reported confidence and knowledge survey scores increased only for families participating in the LENA StartTM program. Families receiving feedback (LENA StartTM and Recordings + Feedback) reported greater increases in reading time than families completing recordings alone. After accounting for baseline values, no overall group differences or differences in trajectories were observed in the number of adult words, conversational turns, or child vocalizations as measured by LENA® recordings. These findings suggest that different components of LENA-based interventions may influence distinct outcomes and underscore the importance of evaluating parent language interventions using multiple measures, extending beyond quantitative indicators of parent–child talk.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11080163

Authors: Anna Kohári Uwe D. Reichel Sarolta Murányi Rebeka Dóra Keserű Katalin Pirsel Katalin Mády

Adults, when talking to infants, adjust their communication across several dimensions, including acoustic, linguistic, and gestural characteristics. However, our knowledge of how these dimensions covary in this register adjustment remains limited. Our objective was to analyze the linguistic elements, gestures and acoustic features (speech rate, vowel space, prosody) of storytelling directed to 6-month-old infants in a multidimensional way. The storytelling of 92 mothers to their own children was investigated and compared to their communication with other adults. We analyzed the acoustic features, gestures, and the linguistic construction of their storytelling. Our results have shown that pointing and showing gestures were more common in infant-directed storytelling, just as interactive expressions unrelated to the story were. The correlation tests across dimensions revealed that infant-directed communication is multidimensional. The cross-dimensional analyses demonstrated that infant-directed communication, compared to adult-directed communication, exhibited more systematic multidimensional coordination. Mothers who used more gestures and interactive elements in their infant-directed communication also tended to modify the acoustic characteristics of their speech to a greater extent relative to their adult-directed speech.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11080162

Authors: Cristina Li

This article examines heritage language transmission within Chinese migrant families in Italy, focussing on the role of Family Language Policy and the interplay between standard (Putonghua) and non-standard local varieties (fangyan). Drawing on semi-structured interviews with six families and the primary school teachers of their children (aged 6–8), the study adopts a multi-perspective design to explore how reported language practices, beliefs, and attitudes interact across family and school domains. Findings indicate a predominant shift towards Putonghua as the primary heritage language, often at the expense of fangyan, which tends to be marginalised by parents or reported as being retained only as passive competence among children. This shift reflects practical considerations and evaluative orientations related to prestige, usefulness, and standardisation. Variation across families shows that alternative orientations persist, with one family valuing fangyan for intergenerational continuity. Teachers’ perspectives further suggest a limited awareness of internal linguistic diversity within the student population. The convergence of family-driven shifts and school-based perceptions may contribute to processes of increasing standardisation in the representation and transmission of heritage varieties. This article contributes to research on heritage language maintenance by offering contextually situated insights into how the interplay between social actors and contextual factors may shape linguistic diversity within diasporic communities.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11080161

Authors: Violetta Cataldo

This study investigates the use of the discourse marker cioè in the Italian speech of first- and second-generation migrants living in Naples, focusing on frequency, phonetic realization, pragmatic functions, and syntactic position. While previous research on discourse markers in Italian as a second language has primarily addressed their functional development, their phonetic realization—especially in contact with regional varieties—remains largely unexplored. The analysis is based on a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews collected within the HELLO Campania! Project and includes Sri Lankan and Filipino speakers, compared with a control group of native Neapolitan speakers. Quantitative analyses reveal clear generational differences: first-generation speakers show low frequencies and limited functional range, whereas second-generation speakers display native-like frequency and distribution. Crucially, results show that migrants not only acquire cioè at a functional level but also reproduce locally salient phonetic variants, including variety-specific patterns of phonetic reduction, i.e., [tʃɛ] and [ʃɛ]. These findings suggest that linguistic integration operates across multiple levels and that discourse markers are sensitive sites of sociophonetic accommodation. The study contributes to research on Italian L2 and language contact by highlighting the role of regional phonetic patterns in shaping the acquisition of high-frequency pragmatic items.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11080160

Authors: Toru Ishii Brian Agbayani

This paper is concerned with a peculiar asymmetry between single and multiple argument ellipsis in Japanese: ellipsis of a single argument is sensitive to syntactic constraints and LF interpretive effects, whereas multiple argument ellipsis is not. We point out that argument ellipsis and topicalization are parallel in this respect: while single topicalization obeys syntactic constraints and exhibits LF interpretive effects, multiple topicalization does not. Following Agbayani and Ishii’s (2023) proposal that multiple topicalization involves prosodic topicalization at PF, we argue that while single argument ellipsis involves syntactic topicalization followed by topic deletion (Fujiwara, 2020, 2022; Mizuno, 2025), multiple argument ellipsis involves prosodic topicalization. We then propose the Universal Uniqueness Principle, which enforces “uniqueness” for any application of movement, and demonstrate that this principle, coupled with the Earliness Principle (Pesetsky, 1989), accounts for asymmetries with single and multiple argument ellipsis/topicalization in relation to the levels where topicalization occurs. We argue that cross-linguistic differences in “uniqueness” phenomena result from different properties of the syntax–prosody mapping, not from a “uniqueness” macro-parameter (Fukui, 1999), providing support for the Uniformity Hypothesis (Chomsky, 2001) and the Externalization Parameter (Chomsky, 2010; Berwick & Chomsky, 2011).

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11080159

Authors: Marta Maffia

This study explores how adult immigrants represent and position their mother tongue/heritage language (L1/HL) within their linguistic repertoires, adopting a heteroglossic perspective on bilingualism and situating the analysis within the autobiographical approach to language education. The research was conducted within the G.U.L.P. project in Naples and is based on a corpus of 268 language portraits produced by learners of Italian as a second language, complemented by oral presentations. Data were analyzed through an integrated quantitative and qualitative methodology, focusing on the spatial distribution of languages in the portraits and on the thematic content of the accompanying presentations. The results show that the L1/HL is most frequently positioned in cognitively and affectively salient areas, particularly the head and the heart, reflecting both rational and emotional conceptualizations of language. While no substantial differences emerge across biographical variables, some tendencies can be observed, including a greater association of the heart with female participants and variation across national groups. Overall, the findings highlight the central role of the L1/HL in learners’ self-representations and confirm the value of the language portrait as a tool for investigating linguistic repertoires and supporting the recognition of plurilingual identities in education, also with adult immigrants.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11080158

Authors: Fouad Ahmed Atallah

Sharia and Law colleges in Saudi universities provide a distinctive educational setting in which classical Islamic jurisprudential discourse and contemporary statutory legal discourse coexist within the same curriculum. Despite this shared institutional context, the pragmatic characteristics of these coexisting normative genres remain largely unexplored from a corpus-based perspective. This study examines how genre differences influence the linguistic formulation of legal definitions and religious rulings across four officially prescribed texts: two classical Hanbali works—Rawḍat al-Nāẓir by Ibn Qudāma and Al-Rawḍ al-Murbiʿ by al-Buhūtī—and two contemporary Saudi statutes—the Civil Transactions Law and the Law of Criminal Procedure. A purpose-built corpus of approximately 480,000 words was analysed using a corpus-assisted discourse analysis design integrating quantitative frequency and keyword analysis with systematic manual pragmatic coding within a triangulated theoretical framework. The findings show that differences in disciplinary genre are systematically reflected in distinct pragmatic profiles. Rawḍat al-Nāẓir is characterised by assertive-definitional speech acts and methodological deontic expressions, whereas Al-Rawḍ al-Murbiʿ is dominated by directive speech acts associated with applied legal rulings. The statutory texts employ standardised legislative constructions, including negative-exceptive formulations, formal prohibition markers, and institution-specific obligation structures. The Civil Transactions Law further exhibits a hybrid pragmatic register through the incorporation of classical jurisprudential maxims into enacted statutory provisions. Based on the systematic literature review undertaken for this study, the findings provide what is, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the first corpus-based pragmatic comparison of these coexisting curricular genres. The study thereby contributes to Arabic legal linguistics, corpus pragmatics, and the linguistic analysis of legal education, while offering empirically grounded insights for curriculum development in Sharia and Law programmes.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11080157

Authors: Xuemei He

Research on dialect contact often frames lexical shifts under pressure from dominant standard or prestige varieties as unidirectional replacement: supra-local forms spread and inherited local vocabulary recedes. This article re-examines that model through Northern Shaanxi Jin, a group of Jin varieties in long-term vertical contact with Standard Mandarin. The analysis draws on structured wordlists, contextual elicitation, an 810 min corpus of spontaneous speech, and a supplementary apparent-time response task with 38 younger speakers. Four domains are examined in detail: weather expressions, the hou (猴) diminutive network, the leng (冷)/liang (凉) temperature contrast, and the generalized classifier ge (个). The corpus and elicited data show that Mandarin-aligned forms have expanded, especially in reportive, institutional, cross-dialectal, and younger-peer settings. These forms, however, do not displace inherited lexical resources along a single trajectory. Local forms remain active in fixed weather and customary expressions, tactile distinctions, address and idiomatic uses, and routine nominal quantification. This pattern is analyzed as lexical stratification supported by semantic reallocation: sustained contact redistributes overlapping forms across semantic ranges, constructional environments, and interactional settings rather than producing uniform lexical replacement.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11080156

Authors: Raymond Siebetcheu

This article examines the changing role of Italian among Cameroonian-origin families who experienced onward migration after a prolonged period of residence in Italy. Drawing on qualitative data collected between June 2024 and August 2025 through socio-biographical questionnaires and semi-structured interviews with 15 families, the study investigates how Italian is maintained, reduced, or refunctionalised after relocation to Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Switzerland, or the United States or return to Cameroon. The findings show that Italian played a central role during the period of residence in Italy, functioning as a language of education, employment, institutional participation, and social integration. After onward migration, however, these functions are largely assumed by the dominant language of the new country, especially among children whose schooling and peer relationships develop in French, English, or German. Nevertheless, Italian rarely disappears completely. It persists in more specialised domains, including couple interaction, transnational networks, professional niches, private communication, lexical routines, naming practices, and emotional attachment to the family’s life in Italy. The article argues that Italian should not be understood only through the binary opposition between language maintenance and language shift. Rather, onward migration produces a functional reconfiguration of Italian, whereby a former language of integration becomes a biographical, relational, and symbolic resource within multilingual family repertoires.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11080155

Authors: Nadiezdha Torres-Sánchez Alonso Guerrero-Galván

In Mexico, diverse sociolinguistic realities have given rise to various situations of language contact, primarily between Spanish and indigenous languages. Intense linguistic contact produces changes in the structure of both languages. This research reviews several studies that have focused on describing variation and processes of change at the morphosyntactic level due to linguistic contact in different varieties of Spanish in contact with indigenous languages. On the one hand, the stability of some of these change processes is noted, and on the other, the function served by both the structures of indigenous languages and the diverse contact situations in which they are immersed is evidenced, which demonstrates that despite sharing contact features, the process and the results are not the same across different Mexican bilingual communities.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11080154

Authors: Raquel Fernández Fuertes Tamara Gómez Carrero

We explore how Spanish gender features are processed by English–Spanish bilingual children from two contact zones (Sotogrande, Spain, and Gibraltar, United Kingdom), divided into two dominance groups. The children come from two schools in which both languages are spoken, while English is the language of instruction. We present offline and online processing data involving linguistic code-switching between subjects and adjectives (Adj) in copulative constructions (the window es is roja red). Two issues are targeted to explore the mental representation that bilinguals have when their two languages are simultaneously activated. (i) The directionality of the switch provides information as to whether or not having to value gender features should result in a more economical representation. (ii) The gender agreement mechanisms that could be enforced when a Spanish adjective switch is processed provide information as to the importance that gender feature valuation has for bilinguals. Data show that no differences appear across the two child groups, which suggests that dominance does not reflect the similar representation that the two bilingual groups seem to have. The preference for English Adj switches and for gender matching Spanish Adj switches is linked to the properties of the two languages involved in the switch and to the hierarchy of processing difficulties.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11080153

Authors: Eeva Sippola Danae Perez Jillian Melchor

This article explores a community-based approach to language documentation in a multilingual, creole-speaking environment. Cavite Chabacano is a highly endangered creole spoken in the Philippines, and its speakers mostly belong to the grandparental generation. In order to ensure its documentation and explore possible new paths to revitalization that go beyond documentation, this study takes as its point of departure the perspectives of community members and locates them in dialog with those of academic researchers. The authors explore large community workshops as a format to identify documentation methods and goals that community members find most accurate, among which a standardized orthography was mentioned. The data are analyzed from a nexus discourse analytical perspective, which helped uncover how community members co-constructed the community and negotiated the past and future of their language.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11080152

Authors: Pasha Koval Sophia A. Malamud Ruth Rosenblum Illia Borzov

The Russian suffix -sja presents a learnability problem: a single morpheme signals five distinct argument-structure alternations (anticausative, reflexive, antipassive, reciprocal, and impersonal). How do monolingual and bilingual children acquire this complex form-function mapping? We report a longitudinal corpus study of 13 Russian-speaking children (five monolinguals and eight bilinguals) examining the emergence, distribution, and productivity of each sja-type. Three main findings emerge. First, children show a productivity hierarchy: anticausative and reflexive occur with many different verbs, whereas reciprocal and impersonal are largely confined to a few high-frequency items. Second, impersonal -sja is uniquely difficult, emerging latest and showing the lowest productivity overall. Third, contrary to predictions from heritage language research, bilingual children in our corpus show no deficit relative to monolinguals (and in fact show earlier emergence across the board). These findings suggest that the bilingual divergence from the monolingual baseline must emerge after early childhood.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11070151

Authors: Andreas Nolda Alexander Geyken

This article investigates methodological questions of diatopic lexical variation in Modern German through a comparative study of empirical data sources. We contrast lexical frequency data from three written corpora on the DWDS corpus query platform—the ZDL-Regionalkorpus, the Webmonitor-Korpus, and the Regionalliteratur-Korpus—with linguistic maps from the Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache (AdA), a resource that documents speaker attitudes towards spoken German every-day language. Our goal is to determine to what extent regional distributions of lexical variants in the AdA compare to the DWDS corpora, and to analyse where these distributions converge and diverge based on data and text type. This is demonstrated through four empirical case studies examining synonyms for ‘Saturday’ (“Samstag”/“Sonnabend”), ‘comma’ (“Komma”/“Beistrich”), ‘bicycle’ (“Fahrrad”/“Radl”/“Velo”), and ‘lift’ (“Aufzug”/“Fahrstuhl”/“Lift”). The results indicate that the general regional distribution of lexical variants in the AdA is largely replicated in the DWDS corpora. Moreover, the corpus data typically show the co-occurrence of several variants in the same region, while speaker attitudes documented in the AdA tend to be more uniform. Finally, different text types represented in the corpora can yield different frequency ratios in specific regions, a finding explained by presumed differences in target audiences and the variable use of regiolectal or dialectal language.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11070150

Authors: Sevgi Çalışır Zenci

This study examines digital lexical resources developed for endangered languages through a qualitative comparative framework grounded in documentary linguistics and digital lexicography. Focusing on four representative cases—the Māori Dictionary, the Ojibwe People’s Dictionary, Talking Dictionaries, and the Endangered Languages Archive—the study analyzes how different models of digital dictionaries are structured and how they support language documentation, pedagogy, and community engagement. Rather than treating these resources as directly comparable entities, the study introduces a typological distinction between stand-alone community-oriented dictionaries and large-scale documentary infrastructures. Based on an operationalized analysis of lexicographic structure, contextualization, technological features, and participation models, the findings demonstrate that digital lexical resources are functionally differentiated rather than hierarchically ordered. The results suggest that these resources operate along a continuum between pedagogical accessibility and documentary depth. Community-based dictionary models tend to emphasize user-oriented design, culturally embedded content, and language learning, while archival platforms prioritize scalability, metadata standardization, and long-term preservation. Importantly, community participation emerges as a variable rather than uniform feature, particularly within large-scale infrastructures. The study contributes to the literature by proposing a functional-typological framework for analyzing digital dictionaries of endangered languages and by highlighting the need to move beyond monolithic and evaluative comparisons. It further emphasizes the importance of integrating community perspectives, contextual richness, and technological adaptability in the design of sustainable digital language resources.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11070149

Authors: Fereshteh Modarresi Manfred Krifka

The core of the Persian tense-aspect system revolves around two verbal stem forms and the so-called durative prefix mi-. We argue that Stem II encodes a perfective meaning, requiring that the event time is contained in the topic time, whereas the prefix mi- encodes that a viewpoint is temporally contained in the event time. Temporal operators, in turn, relate the viewpoint time and the topic time to the utterance time, thus relating the event time to the utterance time. At least one of these methods has to be applied in order to make the predication interpretable. These meanings are modeled within a framework of branching time, which captures facts about the completion or non-completion of events, and provides a novel way for modeling the future. We also treat the use of the prefix mi- in generic sentences and the complex tenses that are expressed with auxiliaries: the modal future, the progressive, and the perfect.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11070148

Authors: Lars Bülow Philip C. Vergeiner Oliver Schallert

This study provides the first systematic combined real- and apparent-time analysis of onomasiological lexical variation and change in the Bavarian, Franconian, and Swabian dialects of Bavaria (Germany). Drawing on two large-scale indirect surveys—the Maurer questionnaires (collected in 1934), and the DaBay dialect app (2025–ongoing)—we examine five lexical concepts (ant, apple core, rooster, potato, and ladybug) using descriptive mapping and Generalised Additive Mixed Models (GAMMs). The results reveal three main patterns: (i) stability in long-established heteronyms (in apple core), (ii) real-time convergence toward Standard German (in ant, potato, and ladybug), and (iii) concept-specific areal realignments driven by competing dialect-internal and standard-influenced variants (in rooster). Dialect geography consistently conditions lexical choices, while social factors play a comparatively minor role. Together, the findings demonstrate that lexical variation and change in Bavaria is systematic, regionally differentiated, and empirically tractable through large-scale historical and contemporary survey data.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11070147

Authors: Lewis Baker E Jamieson

To advance our understanding of the vulnerability of native adult grammars to grammatical attrition, research should further explore the various input contexts in which such attrition may obtain. This article considers contexts where speakers are first exposed in adulthood to a grammatically distinct dialectal variety of their first language (L1), which may result in modifications to the grammar of their native dialect. Within psycholinguistic approaches to L1 attrition, these changes under the influence of a new L1 dialect are often considered part of the same phenomenon as attrition under the influence of a second language (L2). Changes to late-sequential bidialectals’ native dialects have also been investigated within variationist sociolinguistics under the term ‘long-term accommodation’. Despite the fact that both the psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic approaches are essentially studying the same patterns of native grammatical change in the same populations of speakers, communication between the two fields has been scarce. The purpose of this review article is therefore twofold: Firstly, we aim to provide an overview of some key studies evidencing changes in the native grammars of late-sequential bidialectals, bringing together research from the fields of L1 attrition and variationist sociolinguistics. Secondly, building on this review, we explore how drawing upon insights from these two fields can further our understanding of some key issues in the field of L1 grammatical attrition more broadly, and we explore some of the implications for current attempts to model grammatical attrition across a range of input contexts.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11070146

Authors: Matteo Greco Veronica D’Alesio Anna Teresa Porrini

This study investigates the processing of Italian verb constructions containing preverbal dative clitics that function either as arguments or as adjuncts, adopting a developmental perspective across Italian-speaking children, adolescents, and adults. In a self-paced reading experiment, adults and fourteen-year-old adolescents read trivalent verbs selecting a dative argument (‘Martina mi ha prestato una bicicletta.’; Eng.: ‘Martina lent me a bicycle.’) faster than bivalent verbs licensing a benefactive dative (‘Martina mi ha riparato una bicicletta.’; Eng.: ‘Martina repaired me a bicycle), in line with the Argument Structure Hypothesis, which predicts lower processing costs for lexically selected arguments than for syntactically computed adjuncts. In contrast, eleven-year-old children showed no processing differences between the two constructions. A second experiment using eye-tracking with ten-year-old children replicated this null effect, indicating that the absence of sensitivity to the argument–adjunct distinction at this age is not due to methodological factors. Instead, the findings suggest a developmental trajectory, with adult-like processing emerging only in early adolescence. Children’s performance appears to be influenced by grammatical competence rather than by verb argument structure per se. Overall, the results highlight the role of grammatical maturation in real-time syntactic processing.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11070145

Authors: Nala H. Lee Huiyu Zhang

This paper reports on the pilot implementation of ChakapBot, a generative AI-supported chatbot developed to support both the revitalisation and documentation of Baba Malay, an endangered heritage language in Singapore. A six-week pilot was conducted with 26 participants, the majority of whom were adult learners with limited prior exposure to the language and disrupted intergenerational transmission. Drawing on surveys, the study examines participant engagement, perceived usefulness, and the role of the chatbot within a blended learning model combining in-person instruction and digital practice. ChakapBot was trained on a community-curated corpus comprising a dictionary, a textbook, and a grammatical description of Baba Malay, positioning it as both a learning support tool and a means of operationalising existing documentation resources for community use. Findings indicate that participants valued the chatbot for its flexibility, accessibility, and low-pressure environment for independent practice, and perceived it as a complement to human-led instruction rather than a replacement. Participants also reported using Baba Malay beyond classroom settings, including in the home, workplace, and community events. The study highlights how ethically designed, community-curated AI tools can bridge language documentation and revitalisation by transforming documented linguistic knowledge into accessible, everyday practice for learners.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11070144

Authors: Tun Hao

Within the framework of argument realization theory, Semantic Role Lists, Participant Roles, and Predicate–Argument Structures represent competing models of verb semantics, each yielding distinct predictions regarding mental representation and processing complexity. This study formalizes these perspectives into two competing accounts: the Role-Quantity Hypothesis (H1), which posits that processing load is driven by the number of event participants, and the Structure-Quantity Hypothesis (H2), which attributes complexity to the multiplicity of syntactic templates. To evaluate these hypotheses, a lexical decision task was conducted on Chinese verbs. The results revealed a significant main effect of role quantity: two-role verbs elicited longer reaction times and lower accuracy than one-role verbs. Conversely, no significant differences were found between one-structure and two-structure verbs. These findings provide robust empirical support for H1, indicating that role-based representations possess greater psychological reality in the Chinese mental lexicon. We argue that for an isolating language like Chinese, verb processing is primarily event-driven, where role information serves as a predictive heuristic during early lexical access. This study offers new insights into the role-based nature of Chinese verb representation, its psychological reality in real-time processing, and the value of integrating argument realization theory with experimental psycholinguistics.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11070143

Authors: John Lipski

In sustained Spanish–Portuguese contact zones, there is often a mismatch between observable linguistic data and speakers’ views on the degree of resulting hybridity. Terms like “Portuñol/Portunhol” are suggestive of a “third” language, but little empirical evidence has been offered in support of such outcomes, and spontaneous speech does not provide the complete envelope of variation. The present study draws on data collected in Misiones province in northeastern Argentina, where vernacular Portuguese is spoken natively in rural households, and Spanish is first acquired informally. To empirically test popular notions of “Portuñol” hybridity, an array of experimental tasks has been employed to present various monolingual and mixed configurations to bilingual participants. In the sociolinguistic free-fall environment of Misiones, the potential for the emergence of a stable hybrid is at its greatest, but the increasingly fine-grained array of experimental techniques designed to force-feed putative “Portuñol” shows that even with priming, lexical borrowing is still the only consistent contact-induced phenomenon.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11070142

Authors: Séfora Ene-Gimeno Joel Juarros-Basterretxea Samara Sáez-Martínez Jesús Garza Héctor Morillo-Sarto

Many researchers note that mental disorders can be understood as maladaptive attempts to avoid aversive internal experiences, and propose that a functional approach is required to complement topographical classification. Approaches that are based on the function of behavior can identify basic processes for the development of interventions. From this perspective, communication difficulties can be seen as strategies that are based on avoidance that increase distress. Among these problems are problems understanding metaphors, humor, and irony. Relational Frame Theory (RFT) offers a functional framework from which to analyze these processes. All this is the basis of the interventions that are aimed at promoting more adaptive behavior patterns. Moreover, individuals with Social (Pragmatic) Communication Disorder (SPCD) often exhibit impairments in perspective-taking, which RFT interventions aim to address by developing relational framing skills and social cognition. This paper proposes a functional approach and a theoretical framework for understanding interventions in SPCD through RFT.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11070141

Authors: K. David Harrison Hoài Trần Công Minh Khang Hoàng Nghĩa Đ. Nguyễn Hải Lâm Cao Xơm A Lisa Lim Myles L. Lynch Thuy Bui

Environmental knowledge encoded in Bahnar, an Indigenous language of Vietnam, is vital to the Bahnar community and contributes to broader understandings of biodiversity, climate resilience, and sustainable lifeways. We describe a collaborative approach to documenting Bahnar that integrates computational methods with ethnographic, lexicographic, and linguistic fieldwork. Because Bahnar knowledge is transmitted almost entirely through oral tradition rather than writing, effective documentation cannot rely solely on extractive corpus-based or NLP tools. Although three legacy bilingual Bahnar dictionaries exist, they are partially obsolete, uneven in coverage, and largely inaccessible to the community itself. Our corpus analysis of the Bahnar environmental vocabulary, complemented by intensive community-based fieldwork, reveals semantic patterns that closely link environmental knowledge with Bahnar lifeways, subsistence practices, and material culture. These patterns, we argue, are language-specific and may not emerge from analyses of environmental lexicons in languages such as English or Vietnamese. Bahnar semantic categories attribute aesthetic, medicinal, mythological, and spiritual agency to animals, plants, and landscapes, contrasting with classificatory frameworks common in post-industrial societies that emphasize biophysical, scientific, or economic properties. We propose that community-centered digital lexicography can strengthen Bahnar language vitality, enhance local access to cultural knowledge, and simultaneously advance comparative linguistic and environmental research.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11070140

Authors: Xiaoran Chen Shuangshuang Chen

In modern spoken Mandarin, the second-person pronoun nǐ ‘you’ is frequently used beyond its canonical addressee-reference function, including for third-person reference. Although previous studies have documented this phenomenon, little is known about how it is sequentially organized, what interactional work it accomplishes, and how recipients orient to it in naturally occurring conversation. Drawing on conversation analysis, this study examines the use of nǐ for third-person reference in the DIG Mandarin Conversations (DMC) Corpus, focusing on its sequential construction, recipient uptake, and interactional import. The analysis shows that this practice typically follows a recurrent sequential pattern: the referent is first introduced in initial position through an unmarked recognitional form, after which nǐ appears in subsequent position, serving as a marked resource for stance-taking. In response turns, minimal tokens function to provide acknowledgment and possible affiliation, whereas sentential responses enable stance modulation and topic redirection. These findings demonstrate that nǐ used for third-person reference is not an incidental deictic shift, but a recurrent interactional practice for the display and management of stance in Mandarin conversation. This study contributes to broader discussions on person reference, footing, and intersubjectivity in talk-in-interaction.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11070139

Authors: Angela Ralli Georgios Chairetakis

In this article, we deal with the word-formation process of compounding in the Modern Greek dialect of the Aegean island of Lesbos, the so-called “Modern Lesbian”, in comparison to relevant information regarding compounding in Standard Modern Greek. In this dialect, compounding is widespread and constitutes a fertile process of the vocabulary expansion, as in the Greek language in general. Numerous compounds are built, belonging to the three major grammatical categories, that is, nouns (e.g., μυρμηγκόγλινα /mirmigóɣlina/ ‘ant’s fat’), adjectives (e.g., καγιρουμάτς /kaʝirumáts/ ‘cross-eyed’) and verbs (e.g., νιρουκάγιουμι /nirukáʝumi/ ‘be thirsty’), while adverbs are mainly secondary formations, with most of them created on the basis of compound adjectives and the adverbial suffix -a (e.g., πισώκουλα /pisókula/ ‘backwards’ < πισώκουλoυς /pisókulus/ ‘somebody with atypical buttocks’ + -α). On the basis of a morpheme-based theoretical framework, where compounds are considered to be built in morphology, we propose to examine: (a) the Modern Lesbian compound structures, consisting of stems and words, the most frequent of which display the patterns [Stem Stem] and [Stem Word], (b) the existence, type and position of a morphological head in the constructions, (c) the relations of compound internal constituents, and (d) the use of borrowed lexemes from Turkish and Italo-Romance in compound structures. As far as language contact is concerned, we provide examples which show the predominantly matter-borrowing instances and discuss two rare cases of pattern-borrowing from Turkish and Italo-Romance, respectively.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11070138

Authors: Vladislava Warditz

This paper examines how heritage Russian reflects morphosyntactic dynamics in baseline Russian, drawing on three diachronically spaced corpora collected in 2001, 2010, and 2022 in Germany. It identifies recurrent patterns of variation in heritage Russian and assesses how they correspond to domains of instability already attested in the baseline system. The study assumes that transfer, variation, and convergence in heritage Russian are shaped not only by its reduced use in favor of the societal language but also by internal trigger mechanisms analogous to those operating in baseline Russian, while at the same time exhibiting specific variation patterns arising from multilingual variation typical of communication among heritage speakers. The analysis shows that the most prominent domains that consistently emerge as unstable across the corpora are nominal number and case, shifts in nominal and verbal government, and calquing of syntactic constructions. In this respect, heritage Russian mirrors baseline tendencies while also exhibiting contact-enhanced effects. For instance, GEN/ACC competition and the extension of animate object marking occur in both baseline and heritage Russian, whereas the overgeneralization of inanimate object marking appears predominantly in heritage Russian. Similarly, the loss of an instrumental predicative in favor of the nominative and fluctuations in prepositional government reflect baseline instability amplified by German influence. Syntactic variation—including borrowing of connectors, loss of baseline intonation patterns, and pro-drop in impersonal constructions—further illustrates the interaction of internal instability and contact effects, whereby contact-affected syntactic patterns are not attested in baseline Russian. The calquing of German possessive constructions and the shift from prepositionless to prepositional government patterns can be interpreted as instances of contact-induced leveling of Russian typological features, accompanied by simplification where baseline structures diverge from dominant-language patterns. Interpreted as part of a broader shift from synthetic to analytic government, these developments align with both contact-induced tendencies and historically attested changes in Slavic languages. The identified patterns of variation in heritage Russian correspond to domains of instability in baseline Russian, showing that the loci of variation are largely analogous, while their concrete manifestations are partly different. In comparison with baseline Russian, heritage Russian exhibits both analogous and specific—non-canonical—variants, reflecting unstable areas of the baseline in a multilingual setting and becoming particularly visible in subsequent generations of the migrant community. Within a broader typological context, the documented variation trends align with sensitive language domains observed in other contact situations, confirming their systematic character across diverse minoritized contexts.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11070137

Authors: Mar Garachana-Camarero

This article examines the relationship between semantic and syntactic evolution in the development of three Spanish verbal constructions: verbal periphrases, pseudo-coordinative constructions (e.g., va y dice), and auxiliary chains. While theories of grammaticalization and diachronic construction grammar generally predict a parallel decrease in semantic compositionality and syntactic analyzability, the behavior of these constructions suggests a more complex scenario. We argue that semantic compositionality and syntactic analyzability do not always evolve in tandem. Instead, the constructionalization of grammatical patterns may preserve aspects of internal syntax even when constituents undergo functional recategorization. Drawing on previous analyses and a corpus-based examination of Spanish complex predicates, we show that verbal periphrases, pseudo-coordinative constructions, and auxiliary chains maintain analyzable internal structure despite diachronic reduction of compositional meaning. We propose that (complete) loss of analyzability tends to occur only at advanced stages of grammatical change. The study contributes to current debates on the nature of grammaticalization/constructionalization, internal syntax, and the cognitive status of auxiliary constructions, offering a broader perspective on mechanisms of language change.

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages11070136

Authors: Satomi Kawaguchi Bruno Di Biase Thi Thu Huong Ho

This paper examines cross-linguistic evidence towards a universal processing path to the acquisition of argument mapping of verb thematic roles (e.g., agent, patient) onto grammatical functions (e.g., subject, object), in second or additional language (L2) learning. The acquisition of argument mapping in East Asian languages as L2 remains largely under-researched, particularly in terms of development. The data in each language in this study, that is Japanese, Mandarin Chinese and Vietnamese, were collected in separate longitudinal studies using tasks targeted to eliciting verbs requiring a variety of argument structures. These are analysed based on the Lexical Mapping Hypothesis. Results indicate that L2 learners initially map the highest available role in the thematic hierarchy (e.g., agent, experiencer) onto a minimally specified SUBJ/TOP (that is, the language-specific ‘default mapping’ of the L2). Furthermore, the development of argument mapping in learners of all three languages turns out to follow the sequence predicted by LMH, i.e., default mapping > default mapping + additional argument > non-default mapping. The study also identified language-specific phenomena within ‘the non-default mapping’ stage, such as causatives appearing comparatively earlier in Mandarin Chinese L2 and Vietnamese L2, and passives appearing earlier in Japanese L2. This study’s theoretical contribution to the field is that the acquisition of argument mapping plausibly follows a universal processing route and, at the same time, is characterised by language-specific features. It also represents an original investigation in the specific area of L2 acquisition of argument mapping cross-linguistically, and it discloses an often ignored, but theoretically important, difference with the acquisition of argument structure.