bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction
Authors: Duarte Joana , Gogolin Ingrid
Published: March 2014

The relatively recent phenomenon of rapidly increasing migration flows in multiple forms and channels has been termed superdiversity (Vertovec 2007). The resulting new social constellations see an increase in the amount and types of language proficiencies, particularly in large urban areas. Linguistic diversity per se is not a new phenomenon, yet education systems continue to respond to this diversity with the construct of the monolingual habitus (Gogolin 1994) that associates a single language with one nation. National education systems interlace mono- and multilingual features, displaying monolingual self conceptions in their constitutions, structures and practical arrangements on the one hand, and a multilingual student body on the other. Moreover, European education policies show a frustrating facet of this phenomenon. The Council of the European Barcelona objective of 2002, for example, promotes that every child in Europe learns two foreign languages from an early age (Union 2009). At the same time, member states who adopted this document insist on their monolingual mainstream school systems with sections devoted to foreign language teaching, and exceptional provisions for other autochthonous languages on the nation’s territory. Such a system does not cater for the needs of speakers in superdiverse constellations. Our contribution begins with an overview of the concept of superdiversity, particularly focusing on issues of linguistic superdiversity. It provides a summary of research topics, as well as methodological issues. Consequences for traditionally monolingual education systems will then be highlighted. We will then draw an example of monolingual thinking in a bilingual context before our introduction to the volume.
Measuring language diversity in urban ecosystems
Authors: Peukert Hagen
Published: March 2014

Talking about linguistic diversity is one thing, knowing about it is an­other. Linguistic diversity has become a prominent, but vague catch­phrase in public opinion circumscribing a range of societal phenomena from multi-lingual education to multi-ethnicity. A specification of what the concept really addresses can help to establish a more appropriate convention of the term. The objective of this paper is to put the term on scientific grounds and see how linguistic diversity can be captured quantitatively. For this undertaking, we look at other disciplines prof­iting from their rich experience of some sixty years of scientific inquiry in the field of diversity measurements, we see how their conception of diversity ties into the linguistic framework, and we make reasonable extensions to the basket of diversity indices. Thus we link ecology, biology, information science, and linguistics in the endeavor of finding apt measures for understanding diversity. Having derived and adjusted these measures, they are applied to a specific case, that is, the mea­surement of multilingualism in St. Georg, Hamburg.
Foreign language acquisition in heritage speakers
Authors: Kupisch Tanja , Snape Neal , Stangen Ilse
Published: March 2014

L3 acquisition has been a topic of increasing interest throughout the past decade. Nevertheless, linguistically-oriented work has so far paid little attention to the acquisition of foreign languages by second generation minority (or heritage) speakers, who have acquired two languages in early childhood. Our paper investigates article acquisition by German-Turkish speakers, who have grown up in Germany. Specifically, we address the question whether these speakers’ L3 English shows cross-linguistic influence (CLI) from Turkish (their chronological L1) or German (their chronological L2). Results indicate the absence of negative CLI from Turkish and positive CLI from German, their L2. The study can be seen as supporting the view that typological proximity is crucial for CLI, while also allowing for the conclusion that language dominance plays a role.
The primary classroom as a superdiverse hetero-normative space
Authors: Spotti Massimiliano
Published: March 2014

This paper deals with the micro-dynamics of identity construction in a regular multicultural primary school classroom in the Netherlands. More specifically, it analyses the meta-discursive practices of a monolingual indigenous class teacher and of her immigrant minority pupils. Moving away from classical notions of language maintenance and shift, the processes of identity construction reconstructed here suggest three things. First, it suggests that the term allochtonous pupil does not pay justice to highly skilled multilingual stockbrokers busy managing polyphonous cultural and linguistic belongings. Second, that these pupils’ cultural and linguistic management skills enable them to escape the voice of authority through language sabotage. Third, that although pupils are bearers of identities that are high on the agenda of the migrant community, these pupils are also sharply aware of problems of ‘mobility’ that such locally valid inhabited identities may bring when they are deployed in another socio-cultural space.
Assessing narrative development in bilingual first language acquisition
Authors: Kapia Enkeleida
Published: March 2014

Developing appropriate developmental expectations for children exposed to more than one language from birth has become a pivotal task for many researchers across the globe. While it is important to understand why monolingual norms are not always applicable as norms for speakers of superdiverse environments, it is equally important to recognize areas in which monolingual norms are useful in super diverse environments. This study focuses on this issue. Specifically, the study looks at whether language development for 6–7 years old simultaneous bilinguals shares the same developmental milestones with language development data from monolingual children. The analysis is based on narrative data produced by 6 Albanian-speaking monolingual children in Albania and 6 Albanian-Greek speaking bilingual children in Greece.The results are surprising in that data from monolingual children and data from bilingual children show different developmental paths depending on whether micro structure or macro structure language elements are considered. When micro structure language data are taken into consideration, results indicate that monolinguals differ significantly from bilinguals. However, when macro structure elements are considered, then both monolinguals and bilinguals appear to perform at similar levels. In other words, the results from this study suggest that it may be useful and appropriate to use monolingual norms for speakers of superdiverse environments only in terms of assessing macro structure elements of bilinguals’ language, but not micro structure elements.
Language contact in heritage languages  in the Netherlands
Authors: Aalberse Suzanne , Muysken Pieter
Published: March 2014

This paper discusses heritage languages (HLs) in the Netherlands. First, different types of motivations for the study of heritage languages in general are presented, since the type of motivation for the interest in heritage speakers has a large impact on the type of phenomenon researched. Formal, sociolinguistic, pedagogical perspectives are presented together with the perspectives of language change. Secondly, key findings in related immigrant languages research in the Netherlands are presented from various fields such as code-mixing and code-switching, loss and attrition and superdiversity. Thirdly, the initial results of a case study on the Chinese languages as heritage languages in the Netherlands are presented, concerning these languages, and sketching the recent history and trajectory of the Chinese languages in the Netherlands. It is clear that the study of the Chinese languages, but the same holds for several other HLs as well – Malay, Spanish, etc. – can best be studied from the perspective of superdiversity.
Chinese and globalization
Authors: Kroon Sjaak , Blommaert Jan , Jie Dong
Published: March 2014

Globalization poses challenges to sociolinguistics. The main challenge is to come to terms with the phenomenology of sociolinguistic globalization. This phenomenology touches four domains: proper globalization effects on language, the effect of globalization on migration patterns and immigrant communities, the effect of globalization, notably of the spread of English as a global language, on language hierarchies, and the domain of remote communities that have serious doubts regarding their possibilities of successfully participating in the globalization process. The sociolinguistics of globalization can only be studied in the total, central as well as peripheral, global context where globalization processes happen and influence language structures, choices and uses. China is a case in point. On the one hand, China is one of the engines of economic globalization; on the other hand, the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and the 2010 Shanghai World Expo brought globalized mega-events to China, spurring an already booming tourist industry. These developments have changed the sociolinguistic face of China. After an outline of some important issues in globalization and a provisional sketch of a program for the study of sociolinguistic globalization in China, this contribution gives an example of a sociolinguistic analysis of a sequence of bilingual Chinese English order notices that can be found in the micro-linguistic landscape of Beijing.
First exposure learners make use of top-down lexical knowledge when learning words
Authors: Carroll Susanne Elizabeth
Published: March 2014

Learning another language requires learning a new lexicon. Current second language acquisition theories make different predictions about the relative importance of L2 experience and L1 knowledge when learning new words. In a study of first exposure learners, clear effects of knowledge of L1 words were found. However, rapid learning after minimal exposure to continuous speech was also found, even when target words contained novel L2 sounds. Results show both the powerful role of L1 lexical knowledge on L2 word learning and the rapid rate at which sound forms are created and mapped to referents. This suggests that a more nuanced approach to discussion of frequency effects and transfer is needed.
The emergence of a new variety of Russian in a language contact situation
Authors: Ringblom Natasha
Published: March 2014

Simultaneous acquisition of two mother tongues is usually not discussed in terms of language contact. This might reflect the fact that the two languages are believed to develop independently of each other, which is known as The Autonomous Development Hypothesis that implies that bilingual children behave like monolinguals in each of their languages. Given this claim, a child who acquires two mother tongues simultaneously is expected to develop similarly to monolingual children of the respective languages. In this paper we attempt to test this claim on the acquisition of negation by a Russian-Swedish bilingual child and to show that the languages may not develop as independently from each other as was previously assumed. Rather, they develop in permanent interaction, where especially the weaker language (L1weak) is influenced by a stronger one (L1strong), which lead to the development of a totally new variety of Russian in this contact situation.
The acquisition of gender agreement marking in Polish
Authors: Brehmer Bernhard , Rothweiler Monika
Published: March 2014

This study investigates the acquisition of gender agreement marking in Polish noun phrases. It thus sheds light on the general acquisition of noun gender in Polish which, in most cases, can be predicted by the auslaut of the noun. Whether a child knows the gender of a given noun is indicated by his/her ability to produce gender marked attributive adjectives. To test this ability we elicited attributive adjectives in a group of 34 Polish-German children from age 2;11 to 6;5 with Polish as L1. We tested contexts with typically and atypically marked nouns, as well as with nonce words. With respect to correct markings, error rates and error types, we checked whether the children relied on the morphophonological clues of a given noun and/or whether they use a default strategy. Furthermore, we investigated the development of gender agreement marking. Our results show that (1) even at age six the development of gender agreement/marking is not yet completed, (2) the children use morphophonological as well as semantic clues to identify the gender of a given noun, and (3) the children over-apply feminine and masculine markings.
Discourse cohesion in the elicited narratives of early Russian-German sequential bilinguals
Authors: Gagarina Natalia
Published: March 2014

This study examines aspects of discourse cohesion in the elicited narratives of early Russian-German sequential bilinguals at age four to six and compares them to the narratives of monolingual Russian-speaking children at the same age as well as to a group of monolingual adults. This examination quantitatively and qualitatively inspects two groups of devices that establish referential and relational cohesion: (anaphoric) pronouns and connectives. The results show that bilinguals of all age groups produce longer utterances and use more word tokens per story in comparison to monolinguals. The younger group of bilinguals demonstrates higher rates of the use of referential and relational cohesive devices. Moreover, in bilingual children the extension of the use of cohesive devices from the local level to the level of more general discourse organization is more pronounced than in monolinguals. This finding is explained as a bilingual advantage over monolinguals reflecting the sensitivity of bilinguals to establishing cohesive ties in discourse. Thus, the results of this study expand evidence showing that advantages of bilinguals over monolinguals in some areas of language and cognitive competence.
German segments in the speech of German-Spanish bilingual children
Authors: Żaba Aleksandra , Lleó Conxita
Published: March 2014

The production of segments in a first language (L1) has been reported to be different in bilingual children as compared with monolingual children. Often, consonants involve a delay in the bilinguals’ data (see, e.g., Lleó & Rakow 2006), whereas vowels are usually not associated with any delay (see Kehoe 2002). The present work shows new data that suggest that consonants, in this case the ones involved in the German voicing contrast (which is neutralized in final position), contribute to a delay in bilingual acquisition. A vowel, specifically, German underlying schwa, did not cause any delay. In fact, target-like production of schwa seems to have been subject to acceleration in the case of the bilinguals.
Foreign language reforms in Swiss primary schools
Authors: Haenni Hoti Andrea U. , Heinzmann Sybille
Published: March 2014

In German-speaking Central Switzerland, French used to be the only foreign language (FL) taught in primary schools (from grade five onwards). Some cantons have now implemented a program including English as the first FL (L2) to be learnt at school (from grade three onwards), followed by French as the second FL (L3) (from grade five onwards). To examine the impact of this school reform, children of both programs were compared with respect to their French competencies (N = 893). After one year of French instruction, students with previous English (L2) instruction exhibited higher skills in French (L3) listening and reading than students without previous English (L2) instruction. One year later, however, the initial advantage of the more experienced learners had disappeared. The results argue for a more coordinated instruction of the different FLs taught at school that takes the existing experiences of the students into account.
Multilingual constructions
Authors: Höder Steffen
Published: March 2014

Language contact phenomena are often described with reference to their effect on the monolingual systems of the varieties involved, both in historical and in contact linguistics. This contribution argues that an essentially multilingual perspective on these phenomena is more adequate. Bilingual speakers in stable bilingual groups create a common system for all their languages, incorporating both interlingual links and language-unspecified elements along with language-specific structures. In a construction grammar analysis, such systems as well as changes within this type of system can be conceptualized as interlingual constructional networks, which are established, stored, and processed in exactly the same way as monolingual grammars.
Pseudo-coordinations in Faroese
Authors: Heycock Caroline , Petersen Hjalmar P.
Published: March 2014

In this article we describe the system of pseudo-coordinations in Faroese − coordinations in the verbal system in which the second conjunct appears in fact to be subordinated to the first − in the light of previous discussions of this phenomenon in Scandinavian. We discuss pseudo-coordinations − mainly, but not exclusively, with verbs of posture in the first conjunct − that have an aspectual interpretation (e.g. sit and ...); and also pseudo-coordinations where the second conjunct alternates with an infinitive clause (e.g. try and ...). We conclude with an overview of the distribution of pseudo-coordinations in Germanic, and offer some suggestions as to how they may have arisen in Faroese.
Toward a fused lect
Authors: Szabo Csilla-Anna
Published: March 2014

This study investigates the use in the German dialect of Palota (Romania) of a mixed construction1 consisting of the Hungarian generalizing particle akár- (‘ever’) and a German interrogative wh-pronoun, e.g. wer, wann, wo etc. which, following the Hungarian ‘ever’-wh-compound pattern has emerged as a conjunction for the concessive conditional (Leuschner 2000) – a clause type that has a complex structure in Standard German but which is not common in German dialects. A qualitative analysis of the data (23 hours of informal conversations with 33 participants) reveals that there are no monolingual alternatives for concessive conditional conjunctions in the German dialect and that there is no variation of these forms, thus pointing to a grammaticalization process and supporting a movement along the continuum code-switching → language mixing → fused lects (Auer 1998b).
The formation and distribution of the analytic future tense in Polish-German bilinguals
Authors: Brehmer Bernhard , Czachór Agnieszka
Published: March 2014

The paper deals with the formation and use of the two variants of the analytic future tense in Polish by Polish-German bilinguals. Two groups of Polish-German bilinguals were examined: (i) early bilinguals who were already born in Germany or came to Germany before entering school (= heritage speakers), (ii) late bilinguals who moved to Germany at least after finishing school in Poland. The data were taken from elicited narratives and an acceptability judgment task and were compared to data from a monolingual Polish control group. The analysis showed that the formal restrictions for composing the analytic future tense in Polish (i.e. selection of the imperfective aspect) are not really vulnerable to attrition in both bilingual groups. There are, however, differences in the distribution of the two forms of the analytic future tense. The early bilinguals tend to use the combination auxiliary + infinitive of the main verb more frequently since it (i) replicates the corresponding German pattern for the formation of the analytic future, and (ii) allows for not specifying certain grammatical features (e.g. gender), thus reducing the cognitive load for the speaker. The late bilinguals even prefer the combination auxiliary + l-participle to a higher degree than the controls. This could point to a desire to avoid the pattern that is extant in the surrounding language German, but also to a general preference for colloquial features due to reduced exposure to written forms of Standard Polish.
Changing conventions in English-German translations of popular scientific texts
Authors: Kranich Svenja , House Juliane , Becher Viktor
Published: March 2014

This contribution summarizes results of the project Covert Translation, where we investigated the influence of Anglophone communicative conventions on German via translation. Our hypothesis was that the prestige of English as a lingua franca and the growing number of translations from English into German leads to a decline in “cultural filtering”, i.e. a diminishing tendency of translators to adapt conventional Anglophone norms to German norms. In this way, English-German translations may introduce linguistic variation to certain target language registers, with Anglophone usage norms also spreading to non-translated German texts. We will here review a number of project studies using a corpus consisting of (1.) English popular scientific texts, (2.) their translations into German, and (3.) comparable non-translated German texts. These studies show that English-German translations are characterized by a considerable degree of source language ‘shining-through’, which has, however, only in one case led to Anglophone communicative norms spreading to non-translated German texts. We conclude that, for the popular science genre, translation-induced influence of English on German is a marginal phenomenon.
Perception and interpretation of intonational prominence in varieties of South African English
Authors: Zerbian Sabine
Published: March 2014

Through its intonation an utterance conveys semantic and pragmatic meaning, as e.g. in prosodic focus marking. Languages differ in the use and realization of intonation. Many studies have investigated the production of intonation in learner and contact varieties. The study reports on three experiments that investigate the perception and interpretation of prosodic differences and prominence in contact varieties of South African English. The results show that dominant language background is a significant factor in the perception of intonation and that the interpretation of focus marking through prosodic means is difficult for all multilingual speakers.
The prosody of Occitan-French bilinguals
Authors: Sichel-Bazin Rafèu , Buthke Carolin , Meisenburg Trudel
Published: March 2014

Occitan is a threatened Gallo-Romance language in a diglossic contact situation with French in Southern France. To examine the extent of prosodic interference we proceeded to a comparative analysis of semi-spontaneous speech recorded with bilingual speakers in both languages and monolingual northern French speakers. The higher frequency of schwa syllables gives southern French rhythmic properties that recall Occitan. Both languages display Accentual Phrases, a prosodic unit that may contain more than one lexical word but only one final pitch accent, and an optional initial rise. However, in the bilinguals’ prosody, AP-internal rhythmic prominences denote a tendency to maintain remainders of Occitan lexical accent in their French, whereas they correspond to a weakening of word accent in Occitan under French influence.
Devoicing of sibilants as a segmental cue to the influence of Spanish onto current Catalan phonology
Authors: Benet Ariadna , Cortés Susana , Lleó Conxita
Published: March 2014

This article presents production data of sibilant segments by Catalan speakers in a Spanish-Catalan bilingual context. Catalan includes voiced sibilants in its sound system, whereas Spanish only has voiceless ones. Subjects come from two areas of Barcelona differing in the degree of presence of Spanish. Based on previous results on vowel production, we predict that Catalan sibilants, especially the voiceless ones, will be less often produced in a target-like manner in the more Spanish-speaking area, and especially in the younger groups (3–5 and 19–23 years old). Our results confirm this prediction for /z/, whereas for the affricate /dŠ/ percentages of target-like production are low in all groups. These results are accounted for by several internal and external linguistic factors.
Explaining the interpreter’s unease
Authors: Bührig Kristin , Kliche Ortrun , Meyer Bernd , Pawlack Birte
Published: March 2014

This article builds on previous research on ad-hoc interpreting in German hospitals. It discusses the concept of interpreters as “intervenient beings” and its consequences for interpreter training. Although the concept seems to be descriptively adequate, it disregards difficulties of interpreters with their active engagement in communication of others. After discussing two types of active engagement, the article makes suggestions for interpreter training.
Measuring bilingual accommodation in Welsh rural pharmacies
Authors: Prys Myfyr , Deuchar Margaret , Roberts Gwerfyl
Published: March 2014

This paper introduces a method to address the theoretical and practical question of whether speech accommodation aids compliance in bilingual healthcare settings. It describes a method to measure bilingual speech accommodation in interviews between pharmacists and patients about the use of regularly prescribed medication. The method involves calculating the relative proportion of Welsh and English words in segments of the transcripts and using a formula which we devised to measure how much the speaker changes his or her proportion of Welsh versus English words over time in relation to the proportion being used by the interlocutor. Positive scores indicate convergence, negative scores divergence, and a score of zero indicates neither convergence nor divergence. The findings suggest that speech accommodation is widespread within bilingual clinical encounters and there are complex factors at work that influence the dynamics of the bilingual healthcare consultation. Refining methods for measuring accommodation will shed further light on this phenomenon and offer opportunities for enhancing communication skills training for healthcare professionals.
The LeaP corpus
Authors: Gut Ulrike
Published: March 2014

This article describes the compilation, annotation and some exemplary searches of the LeaP corpus, a multilingual 12-hour corpus of spoken learner German and learner English that contains extensive time-aligned phonological and phonetic transcriptions. After outlining the collection and type of primary data that forms the corpus and explaining the manual and automatic annotation procedure, the search options of this resource are described as well as its availability for use by other researchers. The exemplary corpus search is concerned with L2 fluency. Findings of some quantitative and qualitative corpus searches are presented, in particular, the phonetic correlates of fluency and the factors that influence the fluency of foreign language learners.
Creation and analysis of a reading comprehension exercise corpus
Authors: Ott Niels , Ziai Ramon , Meurers Detmar
Published: March 2014

We discuss the collection and analysis of a cross-sectional and longitudinal learner corpus consisting of answers to reading comprehension questions written by adult second language learners of German. We motivate the need for such task-based learner corpora and identify the properties which make reading comprehension exercises a particularly interesting task. In terms of the creation of the corpus, we introduce the web-based WELCOME tool we developed to support the decentralized data collection and annotation of the richly structured corpus in real-life language teaching programs. On the analysis side, we investigate the binary and the complex content-assessment classification scheme used by the annotators and the inter-annotator agreement obtained for the current corpus snapshot, at the halfway point of our four-year effort. We present results showing that for such task-based corpora, meaning assessment can be performed with reasonable agreement and we discuss several sources of disagreement.
The ALeSKo learner corpus
Authors: Zinsmeister Heike , Breckle Margit
Published: March 2014

The ALesKo learner corpus is a small-scale comparable corpus consisting of two subcorpora: annotated essays by advanced Chinese learners of German and comparable essays by German native speakers. The motivation for its compilation was the investigation of discourse-related phenomena such as local coherence in second-language acquisition of German. After introducing how the texts were compiled and annotated, the article focuses on quantitative studies at the token level. We discuss problems of tokenisation and part-of-speech tagging and compare the inventory of the two subcorpora in terms of frequently used N-grams and lexical richness, among other aspects. We conclude the article by describing possible applications of the study in foreign language acquisition research and language teaching.
Corpora of spoken Spanish by simultaneous and successive German-Spanish bilingual and Spanish monolingual children
Authors: Ulloa Marta Saceda , Lleó Conxita , Garcia Sanchez Izarbe
Published: March 2014

This article describes a database of Spanish recorded speech comprised of four corpora. The corpora contain cross-sectional data of Spanish spoken in contact with German. The first corpus, ALCE-BLA (Bilingual Language Acquisition at school age), is comprised of the utterances of 23 Spanish-German simultaneous bilingual children living in Germany and attending the Spanish complementary school at the first level. The second corpus, Phon-cL2, contains the utterances of 15 German children who have learned (or are learning) Spanish after the age of 2;0. The third corpus, Madrid-PhonBLA, contains utterances of 71 Spanish-­German simultaneous bilingual children from Madrid (Spain). The fourth corpus, PhonMAS, contains utterances of monolingual Spanish children, who have been recorded with the purpose to be compared with the bilingual corpora.
Monolingual and bilingual phonoprosodic corpora of child German and child Spanish
Authors: Lleó Conxita
Published: March 2014

This article describes two longitudinal language corpora of child German and child Spanish. One of the corpora, PAIDUS, is comprised of the utterances produced by monolingual German and monolingual Spanish children, between the ages of 1 and ca. 3 years. The German children grew up in Hamburg (Germany) and the Spanish children in Madrid (Spain). The other corpus, PhonBLA, is comprised of utterances produced by German-Spanish bilingual children, between the ages of 1 and ca. 7 years, growing up in Hamburg (Germany). The bilingual children have a Spanish-speaking mother and a German-speaking father. All corpora were collected, transcribed and analyzed within various research projects supported by the DFG, between 1986 and 2011. Several analyses of the data have been published in international journals and books (see References).
Corpus of Polish spoken in Germany
Authors: Czachór Agnieszka
Published: March 2014

The present paper reflects on methodological aspects of the data gathering, analysis, and reuse and will present the practical experience from designing a test battery and selecting and approaching the participants, to conducting the experiments. Our project aims to provide a descriptive survey of contact-­induced change in two groups of bilingual (L1 Polish) speakers currently living in Germany. The corpus contains written and spoken, elicited and free data that complement each other with regard to investigating morphosyntactic phenomena. This paper gives a description of each part of our tests: selecting the topics, conducting the experiment, and choosing technical equipment needed for recording of the speech data; stimuli presentation and description of the software used for grammaticality judgments; construction of a gapped text, and finally the sociolinguistic questionnaire and self-evaluation tasks.
The HABLA-corpus (German-French and German-Italian)
Authors: Kupisch Tanja , Barton Dagmar , Bianchi Giulia , Stangen Ilse
Published: March 2014

The HABLA-corpus (Hamburg Adult Bilingual LAnguage) comprises data in the form of semi-structured interviews gathered in the project E11, Linguistic Aspects of Language Attrition and Second Language Acquisition in adult bilinguals (German-French and German-Italian). E11 investigated the language of adult bilinguals (2L1 speakers) who grew up in Germany, Italy or France being exposed to two languages simultaneously from birth, comparing them to advanced second language (L2) learners. In this contribution, we explain the motivation for creating the corpus and introduce the corpus design, including information about the subjects, data acquisition and labelling, quality and transcription conventions, with the purpose of providing an overview of the corpus and facilitate its use.
Phonoprosodic corpus of spoken Catalan (PhonCAT)
Authors: Benet Ariadna , Cortés Susana , Lleó Conxita
Published: March 2014

This article describes the corpus of spoken Catalan elaborated within the research project “Phonoprosodic development of Catalan in its current bilingual context”. The corpus contains 174 interviews with speakers from three districts of Barcelona varying on the presence of Spanish. The subjects belong to three age groups: children aged 3 to 5, young people aged 19 to 23 and adults aged 32 to 40. The collected data consist of semi-spontaneous speech, free conversations, a role-play, a reading task and a sociolinguistic questionnaire. The goals of the project include auditory and acoustic analyses of Catalan segments (exemplified here by some results on vowels), the study of loan words and of cognates with different gender across Catalan and Spanish, as well as prosodic analyses of intonational phrasing of declaratives and interrogatives.
CoSi – A Corpus of Consecutive and Simultaneous Interpreting
Authors: House Juliane , Meyer Bernd , Schmidt Thomas
Published: March 2014

This paper describes how to access and use a corpus of comparable consecutive and simultaneous interpreting (Brazilian Portuguese and German). The corpus is available free of charge. Our aim is to stimulate discussions on the use and the accessibility of corpora in interpreting studies, and, more generally, the need for corpus-based studies of interpreting.
The corpus “Interpreting in Hospitals”
Authors: Bührig Kristin , Kliche Ortrun , Meyer Bernd , Pawlack Birte
Published: March 2014

This paper explores the question how language corpora can enhance discourse analytic research as well as communication trainings. To do this, we refer to the language corpus “Interpreting in hospitals”, and begin by describing it in detail. Subsequently, the paper exemplifies how the corpus was used to analyse ad-hoc-interpreting in medical settings, focusing on the function of specific linguistic elements and speech actions (Bührig & Meyer 2004). Finally, the paper shows how research findings based on the corpus and data from the corpus can be used in communication trainings, describing a training for bilingual hospital employees. The corpus allows trainers to identify relevant training contents, and it offers the possibility to integrate sections of authentic discourse in the training. The paper illustrates how the training participants accepted and worked with the discourse data, and draws conclusions concerning the use of corpus based analyses in trainings on workplace communication.
Treebanks in translation studies
Authors: Čulo Oliver , Hansen-Schirra Silvia
Published: March 2014

The CroCo Dependeny Treebank comprises a collection of parallel texts of both English and German originals from eight different registers with their German and English translations respectively. In addition to the original multi-layer annotation and alignment of the CroCo Corpus (part-of-speech and phrase structure) we added treebank information (dependencies) to a sample of the parallel texts and aligned the nodes of the tree. This deep annotation and alignment allows us to query the corpus for both crossing edges (e.g. an aligned word pair, which realizes different syntactic functions in the source and target text) and dropped leaves and cut branches (e.g. words or phrases that have no aligned counterparts or incomplete alignments). On this basis, translation shifts on various linguistic levels and combinations thereof can be extracted and classified automatically. Patterns like these will be examined and possible factors triggering shifts named so far, register, grammatical contrast and typical translation strategies, as well as commonalities and differences in valence across English and German are discussed in the light of a possible dimension for categorisation of shifts.
Multilingual phonological corpus analysis
Authors: Rose Yvan
Published: March 2014

In this chapter, I describe the PhonBank database initiative within the larger CHILDES project. After a brief introduction to these inter-related database systems, I move the focus on the types of corpus annotations and analyses which we support within PhonBank, through the Phon software program. Phon greatly facilitates a number of tasks required for the analysis of phonological development. It supports multimedia data linkage, unit segmentation, multiple-blind transcription, automatic labelling of data, and systematic comparisons between target (model) and actual (produced) phonological forms. Building on this description, I then provide a practical illustration in the context of a multilingual study of phonology, taking as an example the analysis of data on the phonological adaptation of linguistic borrowings (loanwords).
Promoting the weak language of German-Spanish bilingual children living in Germany
Authors: Lleó Conxita , Ulloa Marta Saceda , Garcia Sanchez Izarbe
Published: March 2014

This article describes some aspects of Spanish as the weak language of German-Spanish bilingual children growing up in Germany, which is officially a monolingual country. Weak domains are mainly found in the phonetics, but can also be found in the lexicon and in the morphosyntax. The article also describes teaching materials that have been created to promote those weak areas that are vulnerable to the influence of the strong language of the bilingual child. The materials were tried out during nine weeks with children that attended the Spanish complementary school. The analyses show that the percentages of target-like production of children that participated in the trial increased, whereas the percentages of target-like production of the control group, which attended the school without using the materials, decreased.
Toward a phonosemantic definition of iconic words
Authors: Akita Kimi
Published: March 2014

Most studies have tried to define inherently iconic words (mimetics, ideophones) in terms of their formal features but phonosemantic peculiarity, assumed without empirical consideration, is not evidently distinct from regular sound symbolism. Two experiments were conducted to probe the phonosemantic specificity of iconic words. Experiment 1 asked twenty native Japanese speakers to rate 140 novel words, half of which had a shape typical of Japanese iconic words: no systematic difference in consonantal or vocalic symbolism between the two types of stimuli was obtained. Experiment 2 asked twenty native Japanese speakers to judge the consonantal magnitude symbolism of 120 verbs with or without a typical iconic word shape presented in a referentially specific sentence. Verbs sharing a root and a morphophonological shape with an existent iconic word tended to yield sharper magnitude contrasts. Iconic words appear to have marked phonosemantic status, which is grounded on both their formal and referential markedness.
Iconic thinking and the contact-induced transfer of linguistic material
Authors: Herlofsky William J.
Published: March 2014

Stated very simply iconic thinking is the ability to recognize similarities in different phenomena. This way of thinking can often lead to imitation and borrowing when languages come into contact, two important methods that languages have available to them for forming new words and enriching their lexicons. These methods, along with many others, are available to all languages, including sign languages. The present analysis describes how lexical borrowing and word-formation processes in Japan Sign Language (JSL) interact to expand JSL’s lexicon and grammar. The first portion of the analysis illustrates how the structures of words in spoken Japanese can be borrowed into JSL (and an interlanguage, Signed Japanese [SJ]) and then how this can influence the development and use of manual affixes for the transfer of meaning and syntactic relations.
Can we imagine a golden age when all the words were young and…transparent…? If such an age existed, it was one of perfect harmony: things revealed their value in words, and words captured the most salient features of things. — Anatoly Liberman
Ezra Pound among the Mawu
Authors: Dingemanse Mark
Published: March 2014

The Mawu people of eastern Ghana make common use of ideophones: marked words that depict sensory imagery. Ideophones have been described as “poetry in ordinary language,” yet the shadow of Lévy-Bruhl, who assigned such words to the realm of primitivity, has loomed large over linguistics and literary theory alike. The poet Ezra Pound is a case in point: while his fascination with Chinese characters spawned the ideogrammic method, the mimicry and gestures of the “primitive languages in Africa” were never more than a mere curiosity to him. This paper imagines Pound transposed into the linguaculture of the Mawu. What would have struck him about their ways of ‘charging language’ with imagery? I juxtapose Pound’s views of the poetic image with an analysis of how different layers of iconicity in ideophones combine to depict sensory imagery. This exercise illuminates aspects of what one might call ‘the ideophonic method’.
Cognitive iconic grounding of reduplication in language
Authors: Fischer Olga
Published: March 2014

My aim in this paper will be to find out to what extent opaque reduplications could also be said to be (or to have been) motivated (i.e. forming iconic signs), with the further aim of exploring the possibility of a common source for all reduplicated forms. I will show by referring to the way repetition is used in signed languages, by looking at the various functions the prefix ge- has in Germanic languages, which resembles reduplication in terms of its semantics, and by taking common pathways of semantic change into consideration, that such a common source may be said to exist.
Imagic iconicity in the Chinese language
Authors: Hu Zhuanglin
Published: March 2014

The nature of arbitrariness and iconicity has been a heated topic of debate among Chinese linguists and semioticians in the past twenty years. Due to the fact that modern Chinese linguistic scholarship has been strongly influenced by Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, the dominant view in China was once marked by arbitrariness. With the development of cognitive linguistics, the scale has now tilted toward iconicity. Most of the papers in favour of arbitrariness have focused on Saussure’s view of the sign as the dualistic relation between “signifier” and “signified”, and almost remained the same in content in their argument. The present paper will deal with iconicity studies in the Chinese language in China as more and more articles have been emerging in this field and helped deepen our understanding of the ontology and phylogeny of the Chinese language. It will offer a brief review of concepts and views held by Chinese philosophers and etymologists, past and present, in order to elucidate the background to the debate.
Words in the mirror
Authors: Nobile Luca
Published: March 2014

This paper proposes a theoretical, methodological and descriptive framework for combining a gestural-mimetic theory of the sign with the principle of arbitrariness. First, it draws attention to the history of the question, discusses its theoretical core and presents a method to analyse the relationship between the differential system of phono-articulatory signifiers and the differential system of logical-semantic signifieds. Next, this method is tested on the Italian grammatical monosyllables, focusing on a complete description of the words formed from one phoneme (‘monophonemes’), of the words distinguishing grammatical persons and of the adverbial pairs. The main result is that phono-articulatory oppositions (such as [open : closed] and [front : back]) can be systematically described as images of logical-semantic oppositions (such as {complex : simple} and {positive : negative}, respectively). In Section 3, a number of conclusions are drawn, particularly about the difference between linguistic ‘values’ and psychological ‘concepts’.
Image, diagram, and metaphor
Authors: Colapietro Vincent
Published: March 2014

It is far from implausible that some of C. S. Peirce’s other distinctions might eventually prove to be as heuristically fruitful as the distinction of icon, index, and symbol has proven itself to be. This distinction is based upon the relationship between a sign and its dynamical object, a relationship which constitutes the basis (or “ground”) of signification since it accounts for why anything is accorded the status of a sign. Anything functions iconically insofar as the basis of signification is an intrinsic relationship between the perceptible properties of a sign and its object. Anything functions indexically insofar as the basis of its signification is a causal connection, whereas anything functions symbolically insofar as this basis (or “ground”) is a disposition. These distinguishable functions are, more often than not, dynamically integrated in actual signs. They name not separate signs but distinct functions of irreducibly complex processes.
The farmers sowed seeds and hopes
Authors: Shen Yeshayahu , Kotzer Elad
Published: March 2014

Conceptual prominence plays an important role in determining word order in metaphorical sentences: conceptually prominent items tend to precede less prominent ones. In: ‘the farmers sowed seeds and hopes’ the order of the two noun in the conjunctive noun phrase (seeds and hopes) seems more natural than its inverse (hopes and seeds) since seeds (the more concrete noun) is conceptually more prominent than hopes. This linear precedence of prominent items iconically mirrors their ‘cognitive precedence’, namely, the fact that they are retrieved from memory before less prominent counterparts (Kelly et al. 1986, Osgood & Bock 1977). Three factors contributing to conceptual prominence affect word abstractness: ordering – concrete terms tend to precede more abstract ones; animacy – animate terms tend to precede non-animate ones; and salience – salient terms tend to precede less salient ones. We discuss the findings of a series of psychological experiments and corpus studies that lend support to this argument.
Mental space mapping in classical Chinese poetry
Authors: Chang Han-liang
Published: March 2014

Primary verbal composite modelling, as manifested in cognitive poetics, raises serious theoretical questions over the nature and function of the linguistic sign. This chapter attempts to assess Chinese poetics popularized by North American sinologists in the 1960s to 1980s, re-read the so-called ‘Old Style’ Chinese poetry produced before the sixth century, and, finally, investigate why classical poetry in general lacks figurative and imagistic intricacy, characteristic of highly conceit-laden Western poetry, e.g. in the metaphysical and modernistic traditions. Specifically, the essay analyzes the ways in which mental spaces in classical Chinese poetry are mapped and examines how vital relations, scales, force-dynamics, and image-schemata, are integrated or ‘blended’ in creating mediated poetic ‘space’. Through close readings of sample poems in terms of current Language and Space studies, the author argues that the commonly assumed iconicity in classical Chinese poetry should be more properly called poetic indexicality rather than iconicity.