bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Result states in Hungarian
Authors: Piñón Christopher
Published: March 2014

Result states are, broadly speaking, certain kinds of states that are caused by certain types of events, both of which share one or two (or possibly even zero) participants. In Hungarian, various verbs, e.g. kap ‘receive’, as well as various combinations of a preverb and a verb, e.g. zöldre fest ‘paint green’ (‘green.subl paint’), plausibly denote relations between events and result states. In this paper, I propose a semantic account of result states in Hungarian that takes seriously the idea that result states may be modied by temporal modiers ending in the sublative case sufx -rA, e.g. öt napra ‘for ve days’ (‘ve day.subl’), and argue that such modiers may have three readings in conjunction with result states: an actuality-based use, an intention-based use, and an incorporated use. Finally, I argue that the present account of result states is more successful than the treatments proposed by Gyuris (2003), Kiefer (2006), and Bende-Farkas (2007).
Non-referential readings of null subjects in Hungarian
Authors: Tóth Ildikó
Published: March 2014

This paper analyses the possibility of arbitrarily interpreted null subjects in Hungarian with 3PL agreement on the finite and infinitival verb. With the help of numerous types of empirical data, the possible interpretations of arbitrary null subjects are examined and characterized. It is shown that syntactic, semantic, lexical and pragmatic factors interact to determine the available readings. It is proposed that non-referential null subjects should be considered as indefinites contributing a variable to the logical interpretation of the sentence. The problem of default and dummy verbal agreement in constructions with non-referentially interpreted null subjects is also discussed. Finally, the cross-linguistic distribution and typology of non-referential null subjects is discussed and further refined.
Reanalysis in Hungarian comparative subclauses
Authors: Bacskai-Atkari Julia
Published: March 2014

My paper presents a diachronic study of the Left Periphery of Hungarian comparative subclauses, primarily focussing on the development of the complementisers and the operator. Adopting a cartographic approach, I will show that there were two main interrelated processes at work in the development of these subclauses, changing the initial configuration of hogy ‘that’ as a complementiser to a new one having mint ‘than’ as a C head, possibly followed by an overt operator. These two processes involve the reanalysis of mint from an operator to a complementiser by way of the relative cycle, and the appearance of new overt comparative operators due to a change in the deletion of the operator (Comparative Deletion).
Clausal Coordinate Ellipsis (CCE)  in Hungarian compared to CCE  in Dutch, German, and Estonian
Authors: Harbusch Karin , Bátori István
Published: March 2014

Clausal Coordinate Ellipsis (CCE) is a frequent but relatively ill-understood grammatical phenomenon in written and spoken language. It involves the elision of one or more constituents that are shared by two or more coordinated clauses. In this paper, we study four types of CCE that occur in coordinations of two clauses: (1) Gapping (including Long Distance Gapping, Subgapping and Stripping), (2) Forward Conjunction Reduction (FCR), (3) Backward Conjunction Reduction (BCR), and (4) Subject Gap with Finite/Fronted Verb (SGF). In Gapping and its variants, at least the Head Verb of the second clause is deleted. FCR involves deletion of one or more left-peripheral major constituents of the second clause. In BCR, one or more right-peripheral (sub)constituents of the first clause are left out. SGF is deletion of the Subject of the second clause in case of Subject-Verb inversion within the first clause. We adopt the psycholinguistically motivated treatment of CCE by Kempen (2009). This theoretical framework was originally developed for CCE phenomena in two Indo-European languages (Dutch and German), and was shown to generalize, with very few amendments, to Estonian, a Finno-Ugric language. In the present paper, we show that the CCE treatment applies to Hungarian, another Finno-Ugric language, as well.
From metonymy to syntax in the communication of events
Authors: Dessalles Jean-Louis
Published: March 2014

A modular analysis of spontaneous language use provides support for the existence of an identifiable step in language evolution, protolanguage. Our suggestion is that a grammarless form of expression would have evolved to signal unexpected events, a behavior still prevalent in our species. Words could not be so specific as to refer to whole, non-recurring, situations. They referred to elements such as objects or locations, and the communicated event was inferred metonymically. Compositionality was achieved, without syntax, through multi-metonymy, as words referring to elements of the same situation were concatenated into proto-utterances.
Growth points from the very beginning
Authors: McNeill David , Duncan Susan D. , Cole Jonathan , Gallagher Shaun , Bertenthal Bennett
Published: March 2014

Early humans formed language units consisting of global and discrete dimensions of semiosis in dynamic opposition, or ‘growth points.’ At some point, gestures gained the power to orchestrate actions, manual and vocal, with significances other than those of the actions themselves, giving rise to cognition framed in dual terms. However, our proposal emphasizes natural selection of joint gesture-speech, not ‘gesture-first’ in language origin.
Holophrasis and the protolanguage spectrum
Authors: Arbib Michael A.
Published: March 2014

Much of the debate concerning the question "Was Protolanguage Holophrastic?" assumes that protolanguage existed as a single, stable transitional form between communication systems akin to those of modern primates and human languages as we know them today. The present paper argues for a spectrum of protolanguages preceding modern languages emphasizing that (i) protospeech was intertwined with protosign and gesture; (ii) grammar emerged from a growing population of constructions; and (iii) an increasing protolexicon drove the emergence of phonological structure. This framework weakens arguments for the view that the earliest protolanguages were not holophrastic while advancing the claim that protolanguages became increasingly compositional over time en route to the emergence of true languages.
But how did protolanguage actually start?
Authors: Bickerton Derek
Published: March 2014

In dealing with the nature of protolanguage, an important formative factor in its development, and one that would surely have influenced that nature, has too often been neglected: the precise circumstances under which protolanguage arose. Three factors are involved in this neglect: a failure to appreciate radical differences between the functions of language and animal communication, a failure to relate developments to the overall course of human evolution, and the supposition that protolanguage represents a package, rather than a series of separate developments that sequentially impacted the communication of pre-humans. An approach that takes these factors into account is very briefly suggested.
Modality and ENGAGEMENT in British and German political interviews
Authors: Becker Annette
Published: March 2014

Speakers regulary use modality and other resources from the appraisal system of engagement to position themselves intersubjectively. In doing so, they modify the discursive space for the voices of others. This is particularly relevant in political media interviews, especially in questions with topics that are potentially face-threatening to the interviewees’ public face. This paper compares the use of modality and other engagement resources in British and German political interviews and discusses the differences in frequency and function. Data is taken from videotaped and transcribed political interviews conducted during British and German election night broadcasts. Their analysis is based on recent studies in contrastive pragmatics, appraisal theory and pragmatically oriented studies on media discourse, bearing in mind that cross-cultural comparison of data taken from a particular genre has to take into account a broad range of contextual factors including genre-specific constraints.
Challenges in contrast
Authors: Fetzer Anita
Published: March 2014

Challenges express the speaker’s intention not to comply with a proposition, force or presupposition communicated in and through a prior conversational contribution. This may be a directly adjacent contribution, some less directly adjacent contribution, or a conversational contribution uttered in some prior discourse. As for its sequential status, a challenge is a responsive contribution, and from an interpersonal perspective, it tends to carry a high degree of face-threatening potential. A felicitous analysis of a challenge thus needs to go beyond a single conversational contribution, not only accommodating context but also the nature of a challenge’s embeddedness in context. The contribution is organized as follows: The first section systematizes the necessary and sufficient contextual constraints and requirements for a conversational contribution to be assigned the status of a challenge. The second part argues for a challenge to be conceptualized as a particularized contextual configuration, which may serve as a tertium comparationis in contrastive pragmatics. The third section exemplifies the frame of reference with a contrastive analysis of British and German challenges adopted from a corpus of political interviews. In both sets of data, challenges tend to be realized implicitly, and in both sets, challenging the content of a contribution is more frequent than challenging its force or presuppositions. While the British data display a wider variety of challenges, the German data prefer the content-based, implicitly realized challenge.
Interruption in advanced learner French
Authors: Guillot Marie-Noëlle
Published: March 2014

This exploratory study focuses on interruption as a feature of conversational management in multi-participant talk in advanced L2 French, based on a comparison with L1 French and English. It has two overall objectives: to consider pragmatic adaptations in L2 French from the point of view of interactional pressures, and to assess cross-cultural differences in the management of talk from the standpoint of learners. It is thus at the interface between interlanguage and cross-cultural pragmatics research. The analysis highlights tensions between pragmatic and processing demands in the learner data, resulting in limited pragmatic discrimination, differential adaptations to native French practices and possible stereotyping.
Grammaticalization in creoles
Authors: Bruyn Adrienne
Published: March 2014

Cases from Sranan are presented in order to illustrate the various processes and mechanisms involved in developments in a creole language that could be interpreted as grammaticalization. While we do find “ordinary” grammaticalization, substrate patterns sometimes provided a model. In the extreme case, where the development consists of a large shortcut, grammaticalization as a usage-based process is no longer at issue, but rather a kind of local relexification variously referred to as “calquing” (Keesing 1991), “apparent grammaticalization” (Bruyn 1996), or “polysemy copying” (Heine and Kuteva 2005). Yet other cases involve reanalysis of a lexifier form without grammaticalization (Detges 2000). Distinguishing between the various types of developments is essential both for understanding the processes shaping creoles, and for delimiting the concept of grammaticalization.
Tone inventories and tune-text alignments
Authors: Gooden Shelome , Drayton Kathy-Ann , Beckman Mary E.
Published: March 2014

The “hybrid” prosodic systems described for several Caribbean creoles challenge typologies that dichotomize between “intonation languages” and “tone languages” or between “stress” and “pitch-accent” languages. A more nuanced differentiation emerges if languages are compared in terms of questions concerning tone inventory and tune-text alignment, such as: Are the tunes of short utterances composed primarily of tone patterns specified to contrast words or of intonation patterns that are morphemes in their own right? What determines tune-text alignment at the lowest levels of the prosodic hierarchy? Should tones be anchored to rhythmically prominent syllables within focused constituents? This paper explores these questions for several languages with “hybrid” prosodic systems including some where the hybrid nature cannot plausibly be attributed to language contact.
The African slave population of Portuguese India
Authors: Cardoso Hugo C.
Published: March 2014

This article is primarily concerned with quantifying the African(-born) population in the early Portuguese settlements in India and defining its linguistic profile, as a means to understand the extent and limitations of its impact on the emerging Indo-Portuguese creoles. Apart from long-established commercial links (including the slave trade) between East Africa and India, which could have facilitated linguistic interchange between the two regions, Smith (1984) and Clements (2000) also consider that the long African sojourn of all those travelling the Cape Route may have transported an African-developed pidgin to Asia. In this article, I concentrate on population displacement brought about by the slave trade.
Published sources and data uncovered during archival research permit a characterisation of the African population in terms of (a) their numbers (relative to the overall population), (b) their origin, and (c) their position within the colonial social scale. The scenario that emerges for most territories of Portuguese India is that of a significant slave population distributed over the colonial households in small numbers, in what is best described as a ‘homestead society’ (Chaudenson 1992, 2001). It is also made evident that there was a steady influx of slave imports well into the 19th century, and that the Bantu-speaking regions of modern-day Mozambique were the primary sources of slaves for the trade with Portuguese India.
Illusions of simplicity
Authors: Borkent Mike
Published: March 2014

Visual poems employ the materiality of language (such as letter- and word-forms and page layouts), to help develop their meanings, thereby synthesizing visual and verbal cues. To discuss this multimodal genre, I posit a framework based on cognitive research of fictive motion, frames, simulation, and blending. I apply this framework to two works by Canadian poet bpNichol to illustrate some of the central cognitive processes and connections required to synthesize and understand them, something previous theoretical positions have struggled with. My analysis illustrates that these apparently simplistic poems are far more complex than we realize. The posited framework can easily extend beyond visual poetry to other multimodal genres, such as comics and advertising, and can also contribute to discussions of genre, style, and other issues of form in literature.
Alternativity in poetry and drama
Authors: Dancygier Barbara
Published: March 2014

This paper considers the use of alternativity and stance in dramatic and poetic discourse. After a brief look at negation as a phenomenon based on alternative mental spaces, I show how negation can be viewed as ‘intersubjective’. The paper then looks at the intersubjective aspects of negation in a scene from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him). In the next sections, the poetic style of Wisława Szymborska comes under investigation. In particular, the discussion highlights mechanisms such as frame-evocation, counterfactuality, causation, blending, and the alternativity of or. I argue throughout that the primary role of negation and alternativity in dramatic and poetic discourse is making available uncommunicated mental spaces and construals which are then used in the resulting interpretation.
Nineteenth-century English politeness
Authors: Culpeper Jonathan , Demmen Jane
Published: March 2014

In this paper we argue that the kind of individualistic ethos Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness model is accused of — and in particular its notion of (non-imposition) negative face — is not simply a reflection of British culture, but a reflection of British culture at a specific point in time. That point is the nineteenth century. Before then, the notion of an individual self separate from society and with its own hidden desires was not fully established. We argue that sociocultural developments, such as secularisation, the rise of Protestantism, social and geographical mobility, and the rise of individualism, created conditions in which the self became part of a new ideology where it was viewed as a property of the individual, and was associated with positive values such as self-help, self-control and self-respect. We also trace the history of conventional indirect requests, specifically can/could you X structures, the most frequent request structures used in British English today and, moreover, emblematic of British negative politeness. We show how such ability-oriented structures developed in the nineteenth century, and propose a tentative explanation as to why ability in particular was their focus.
A socio-cognitive approach to historical politeness
Authors: Watts Richard J.
Published: March 2014

The central argument of this paper is that “politeness”, when looked at not as a theoretical term but as a lexeme in the English language, has a relatively unstable set of cognitive concepts for which it prompts when used. The first-order notion of “politeness” developed by Watts, Ide and Ehlich (1992a), Watts (2003, 2005) and Locher (2004) entails the need for a very different form of theorisation from the rationalist/objectivist approach presented in Brown and Levinson ([1978] 1987). The only way to develop such a new “theory” of first-order “politeness” is to take positively and negatively evaluated linguistic expressions referring to the general area of “politeness” (polite, polished, refined, well-mannered, standoffish, etc.) to prompt for the socio-cognitive construction of a range of meanings that do not always correspond to one another or even overlap, i.e. to develop a socio-cognitive constructionist approach to emergent social practice. In terms of looking at “politeness” from a historical point of view, it is obviously difficult if not impossible to reconstruct the forms of emergent social practice, but English writings during the early eighteenth century are replete with references to terms such as polite, polished, affected, politeness, etc. The close study of how such terms are used reveals that what was understood by them was very different from what politeness researchers of today understand by “politeness”, and such differences can only be accounted for by positing a relativist model that can account for variability and change.
Insults, violence, and the meaning of lytegian in the Old English Battle of Maldon
Authors: Pakis Valentine A.
Published: March 2014

The history of impoliteness — of which insults are a part — and violence are intertwined. In medieval Germanic cultural history, this link manifests itself in historical-pragmatic contexts such as sennur, whettings, and flyting-to-fighting scenarios, which are surveyed in this paper. The ethological origins of such interactions are called into question with reference to the Freudian death drive. Based on the connection between insults and violence, a novel definition of Old English lytegian in the Battle of Maldon is offered, namely ‘jeer, insult’, with comparative support from Icelandic.
An evolutionary take on (im)politeness
Authors: Bax Marcel
Published: March 2014

This paper is intended as an overall template of the evolution of (im)politeness. It elucidates how (linguistic) rapport management originated and developed over time, and tries to come to grips with (some of) the sociocultural factors behind such changes. Taking its point of departure in human prehistory (Section 1), the paper argues that, contrary to received wisdom, politeness and impoliteness are not two sides of the same coin (Section 2), and it discusses the dissimilar evolutionary antecedents of politeness and impoliteness (Sections 3 and 4). The paper then maps out three broad-scale diachronic trends regarding the conveyance of interpersonal distance, ipso facto the marking out of socio-proxemic interactional space; namely, (a) from performative to verbal, (b) from self-display to other-concern and (c) from collectivity-oriented to individual-oriented (Section 5).
Believe-type raising-to-object and raising-to-subject verbs in English and Dutch
Authors: Noël Dirk , Colleman Timothy
Published: March 2014

The so-called ‘raising-to-subject’ pattern that verbs of the type believe can occur in is usually treated as the passive alternative for the so-called ‘raising-to-object’ pattern. In addition to broadening the empirical basis for the opposite claim that the English and Dutch raising-to-subject (or ‘nominative and infinitive’) patterns have a special functionality which is different from that of the passive construction, this paper specifically examines the stronger proposition that this has always been the case. It empirically investigates whether this proposition holds equally well for English and Dutch through a comparison of the frequencies of believe-type raising-to-object and raising-to-subject patterns in two diachronic corpora. The methodology makes use of Distinctive Collexeme Analysis.
Systematicity and arbitrariness in novel communication systems
Authors: Theisen-White Carrie Ann , Oberlander Jon , Kirby Simon
Published: March 2014

Arbitrariness and systematicity are two of language’s most fascinating properties. Although both are characterizations of the mappings between signals and meanings, their emergence and evolution in communication systems has generally been explored independently. We present an experiment in which both arbitrariness and systematicity are probed. Participants invent signs from scratch to refer to a set of items that share salient semantic features. Through interaction, the systematic re-use of arbitrary signal elements emerges.
On using qualitative lexicostatistics to illuminate language history
Authors: Grant Anthony P.
Published: March 2014

Following certain aspects of the work on lexicostatistics carried out in the 1960s and published thereafter (Hooley 1971, Miller et al. 1971, Miller 1984) and thereby working in a tradition which has most recently been practised by Ringe et al. (1997, 2001), among others, I maintain that much of lasting value can be learned about linguistic interrelationships by using techniques which have been developed in work on qualitative (rather than merely quantitative) lexicostatistics, using character-based methods.
Phonetic comparison, varieties, and networks
Authors: Sullivan Jennifer , McMahon April
Published: March 2014

While his eponymous basic vocabulary lists and the study of language divergence may be Swadesh’s most appreciated legacies, we demonstrate that phonetic quantification of language varieties also follows very much in the tradition of Swadesh’s own work. We compare a few different measures of phonetic distance on a very small set of data from Germanic varieties, showing the influence of lexicostatistics and the relevance of Swadesh’s ‘Mesh Principle’. What we emphasise overall is that Swadesh’s influence is palpable, even in domains outside those for which he is best remembered.
Using a maze task to track lexical and sentence processing
Authors: Forster Kenneth I.
Published: March 2014

A word maze consists of a sequence of frames, each containing two alternatives. Subjects are required to select one of those alternatives according to some criterion defined by the experimenter. This simple technique can be used to investigate a wide range of issues. For example, if one alternative is a word and the other is a nonword, the subject may be required to press a key to indicate where the word is. This provides an interesting variant of the lexical decision task, since the difficulty of the lexical discrimination can be manipulated on a trial-by-trial basis by varying the properties of the nonword alternative. On the other hand, a version of a self-paced reading task is created if each successive frame contains a word that can continue a sentence, and the subject is required to identify which word that is. Once again, by manipulating the properties of the incorrect alternative one may be able to control the mode of processing adopted by the subject. Although this is a highly artificial form of reading, it does allow one to study the sentence processing under more tightly controlled conditions.
Connectionism and the role of morphology in visual word recognition
Authors: Rueckl Jay
Published: March 2014

This paper provides a review of the connectionist perspective on the role of morphology in visual word recognition. Several computational models of morphological effects in reading are described and relationships between these models, models of past tense production, and models of other aspects of word recognition are traced. Limitations of extant models are noted, as are some of the technical challenges that must be solved to develop the next generation of models. Finally, some directions for future research are identified.
Demythologizing the word frequency effect
Authors: Baayen Harald
Published: March 2014

This study starts from the hypothesis, first advanced by McDonald and Shillcock (2001), that the word frequency effect for a large part reflects local syntactic co-occurrence. It is shown that indeed the word frequency effect in the sense of pure repeated exposure accounts for only a small proportion of the variance in lexical decision, and that local syntactic and morphological co-occurrence probabilities are what makes word frequency a powerful predictor for lexical decision latencies. A comparison of two computational models, the cascaded dual route model (Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001) and the Naive Discriminative Reader (Baayen, Milin, Filipovic Durdjevic, Hendrix, & Marelli, 2010), indicates that only the latter model properly captures the quantitative weight of the latent dimensions of lexical variation as predictors of response times. Computational models that account for frequency of occurrence by some mechanism equivalent to a counter in the head therefore run the risk of overestimating the role of frequency as repetition, of overestimating the importance of words’ form properties, and of underestimating the importance of contextual learning during past experience in proficient reading.
L’attrition de la première langue en tant que phénomène psycholinguistique
Authors: Köpke Barbara , Schmid Monika S.
Published: March 2014

Cet article présente un aperçu de plusieurs questions que se pose actuellement la recherche sur l’attrition. Dans la première section, nous nous intéresserons à des questions de terminologie et soulignerons la nécessité de distinguer l’attrition — en tant que phénomène individuel — des processus de changement linguistique collectifs, comme le glissement ou la mort d’une langue. Nous aborderons ensuite la question de l’influence de l’âge du début du processus, en opposant l’attrition à l’acquisition incomplète, d’une part, et aux effets du bilinguisme « normal », d’autre part. Nous traiterons ensuite des aspects neuropsycholinguistiques du processus d’attrition. L’hypothèse avancée est que les phénomènes linguistiques observés dans l’attrition ne peuvent pas être attribués à une érosion de la compétence linguistique sous-jacente, mais qu’ils s’expliquent de façon plus convaincante par l’activation et l’inhibition des connaissances linguistiques, comme le montrent notamment les difficultés observées dans l’accès lexical ou lors de disfluences dans le discours spontané.
Restructuring in the L1 Turkish grammar
Authors: Gürel Ayşe , Yılmaz Gülsen
Published: March 2014

This paper compares results of two studies examining L2 English and L2 Dutch-induced syntactic changes that occur in L1 Turkish grammars of speakers living in North America and in the Netherlands, respectively. We examine potential restructuring in the L1 knowledge of binding properties of overt and null subject pronouns in first and second generation immigrants. The results of the L2 Dutch-speaking groups in the Netherlands are found to be similar to those of the L2 English-speaking group in North America, as reported in Gürel (2002), in the sense that all bilingual groups diverge, to some extent, from monolinguals in their judgments of pronoun binding. In line with our predictions, findings suggest that L2 English and L2 Dutch can influence L1 Turkish syntactic judgments in a similar fashion and that an L2 can induce inter- as well as intra-generational L1 change.
“What an un-wiki way of doing things”
Authors: Ensslin Astrid
Published: March 2014

Wikipedia defines itself as “the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the internet”, thus featuring an explicit language policy in its mission statement. Bearing in mind that the site has become the most popular source of encyclopaedic information online, its significance for public encounters with multilingualism should not be underestimated. This chapter offers a critical and multimodal discourse analytical approach to Wikipedia’s explicit and implicit multilingual policies and practices. I examine, under “explicit metalinguistic practice” (Woolard 1998), public disclaimers and exemplary user practice and talk on the “Multilingual Coordination” entry. Under “implicit metapragmatics”, I shall offer a multimodal analysis of Wikipedia’s multilingualism-oriented interface design; the corporate logo and its paratextual meta-commentary on a number of linguistic and journalistic websites; and a code-critical reading of Wikipedia’s “Babel” user language templates. My observations are discussed against the backdrop of postcolonialist theories on the role of English as lingua franca of the information age.
Unity in disunity
Authors: Milani Tommaso M. , Davies Bethan , Turner Will
Published: March 2014

This chapter takes as a point of departure the website of the “Voices” project, a large media enterprise on languages in the UK conducted by the BBC in 2003–2005. With the help of the notions of language ideology and the analytical tools of multimodal critical discourse analysis, the paper shows how representations of languages on the website are a discursive terrain on which negotiations of national identities are played out. Essentially, the argument is that there is a constant tension between centripetal (unifying) and centrifugal (particularising) forces which strive for the production of different, concomitant and often conflicting national identities. Whereas the BBC seeks to represent the UK as a happy and unified multilingual nation, the many postings on the website show how multilingualism is not always perceived by speakers as a happy and unproblematic phenomenon, but is a politically-fraught issue that creates strong disagreements about the values of different languages in British society as well as their functions as markers of different national identities.
The acquisition of nominal determiners in French and German
Authors: Bassano-Bonhommo Dominique , Korecky-Kröll Katharina , Maillochon Isabelle , Dressler Wolfgang U.
Published: March 2014

In many languages, the acquisition of nominal determiners is a central aspect of the emergence of grammar in children. This study compares the development of determiners — between the ages 1–3 — in the spontaneous productions of two children who acquire French and Austrian German respectively. Starting with the contrast between Romance and Germanic languages and focusing on morphosyntactic factors, the study evaluates the impact of typological and language-specific differences on the acquisition of determiners. We examine the prediction that determiners should emerge earlier in French than in German and classical hypotheses concerning varying prominence among determiners, definite over indefinite, masculine over feminine, and singular over plural, in the light of developmental data.
Exploring patterns of adaptation in child-directed speech during the process of early grammaticalization in child language
Authors: van Dijk Marijn , van Geert Paul
Published: March 2014

This contribution analyzes adaptation between child language and child-directed speech (CDS) during the development of grammaticalization in child language. The study compares developmental trajectories of three children (learning Dutch, Austrian German and French) with the trajectories of the CDS of their caretakers. It takes an exploratory approach to describing patterns of development and variability in specific aspects of language development, such as the relative frequency of one-, two/three- and more-word utterances, noun proportions in vocabulary, and determiner/filler use and omission. The analyses consist of descriptive techniques that can be used to visualize patterns of development, which are transferable to other contexts. The results point to real time, ongoing processes of accommodation that are part of an effective communicative flow.
Language-specificity of motion event expressions in young Korean children
Authors: Choi Soonja
Published: March 2014

This paper examines the development of motion expressions in two Korean children. The database consists of bi-weekly to monthly recordings of spontaneous mother–child interaction in their home between ages 1:11 and 4;2. All expressions of motion, both spontaneous and caused, were analyzed following the coding system developed by Hickmann, Hendriks & Champaud (2009). Analyses include form–function relationships between the types of linguistic devices used and the components of Motion expressed (e.g. Path, Manner, Cause), as well as the semantic density of motion-relevant information within the clause. The results were then compared to those of French and English learners reported in Hickmann et al. (2009).

Korean is typologically a verb-framed language similar to French (Talmy, 2000), but it allows serial verb constructions and postpositional markers. Results show that from two years of age, Korean children use these syntactic features and produce semantically denser utterances than French children. Moreover, Korean children often express Manner of Motion with adverbs, another characteristic feature in the adult Korean grammar. These findings support the claim that language-specific grammar influences children’s expression of Motion events from very early on. In addition, the present study shows that significant variation exists among languages of the same type.
Fluency versus accuracy in advanced spoken learner language
Authors: Brand Christiane , Götz Sandra
Published: March 2014

In this paper we present a possible multi-method approach towards the description of a potential correlation between errors and temporal variables of (dys-)fluency in spoken learner language. Using the German subcorpus of the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) and the native control corpus Louvain Corpus of Native English Conversation (LOCNEC), we first analysed errors and temporal variables of fluency quantitatively. We detected lexical and grammatical categories which are especially error-prone as well as problematic aspects of fluency for all learners in the LINDSEI subcorpus, e.g. confusion in tense agreement across clauses or an overuse of unfilled pauses. In the ensuing qualitative analysis of five prototypical learners, no trend for a possible correlation of accuracy and fluency could be observed. Fifty native speakers’ ratings of these five learners revealed that the learner with an average performance across the investigated variables received the highest ratings for overall oral proficiency.
Fluency, complexity and informativeness in native and non-native speech
Authors: Osborne John
Published: March 2014

Individual speakers vary considerably in their rate of speech, their syntactic choices, and the organisation of information in their discourse. This study, based on a corpus of monologue productions from native and non-native speakers of English and French, examines the relations between temporal fluency, syntactic complexity and informational content. The purpose is to identify which features, or combinations of features, are common to more fluent speakers, and which are more idiosyncratic in nature. While the syntax of fluent speakers is not necessarily more complex than that of less fluent speakers, it is suggested that they are able to deliver content more efficiently through a combination of less hesitant speech and of lexical and syntactic choices that allow them to package information more economically.
Syntax and prosodic consequences in ASL
Authors: Churng Sarah
Published: March 2014

This study investigates three different multiple wh-question types in American Sign Language (ASL). While the three are strikingly similar, subtle but systematic differences in their prosody make them semantically distinct. I derive these distinctions from their syntax, via extensions of Koopman and Szabolcsi’s (2000) remnant movement and Sportiche’s (1988) stranded movement, and I propose that multiple wh-questions in ASL involve Parallel Merge structures of the kind proposed by Citko (2005). I also present new generalizations to characterize their prosody, whereby A-bar movement gives rise to prosodic breaks and ‘prosodic resets’.
The representation of agents of translation in (South) Africa
Authors: Marais Kobus
Published: March 2014

This article discusses agency in translation as conceptualized in recent developments in Translation Studies. As a subtext, it poses the representation of its own data as a methodological problem. The article discusses Donald Strachan as a possible agent of translation, probing the implications of his interpreting and translation work in a border setting in South Africa in the late 1800s. It then juxtaposes this perspective with the translation theory of Edwin Gentzler, who claims that translators are creating cultures by way of their work. From this encounter, the author suggests a number of implications for researching translation in Africa. The paper ends by reflecting on its own subtext.
Prosodic and multimodal markers of humor in conversation
Authors: Attardo Salvatore , Pickering Lucy , Baker Amanda
Published: March 2014

This case study extends the findings of Pickering et al. 2009 to the domain of conversational humor. We find that, as was the case in humorous narratives, conversational humor is not marked by higher pitch or volume, increased speech rate, or significant pauses. Unlike narrative humor, conversational humor is not produced at a lower pitch and slower rate than non-humorous parts of the text. We find that smiling and laughter tend to occur with humor.
Verbal irony in the wild
Authors: Bryant Gregory A.
Published: March 2014

Verbal irony constitutes a rough class of indirect intentional communication involving a complex interaction of language-specific and communication-general phenomena. Conversationalists use verbal irony in conjunction with paralinguistic signals such as speech prosody. Researchers examining acoustic features of speech communication usually focus on how prosodic information relates to the surface structure of utterances, and often ignore prosodic phenomena associated with implied meaning. In the case of verbal irony, there exists some debate concerning how these prosodic features manifest themselves in conversation. A form-function approach can provide a valuable tool for understanding speakers’ varied vocal strategies in this domain. Here I describe several ways conversationalists employ prosodic contrasts, laughter, and other speech characteristics in their attempts to communicate effectively and efficiently. The presented examples, culled from spontaneous conversation recordings, reveal just a small sample of the enormous variation in delivery styles speakers adopt when communicating with ironic language.
Awareness in metaphor understanding
Authors: Stöver Hanna
Published: March 2014

This paper argues that a cognitive account of metaphor comprehension needs to include awareness of metaphoricity in order to fully explain the processes involved. In Relevance Theory as well as in other cognitively oriented approaches, much can be gained by making explicit the difference between conscious and subconscious processing: whether a communicator is aware of an expression’s metaphoricity or not may have an impact on the type of cognitive processing involved. A theoretical investigation is offered which explores the potential role of reflective reasoning in metaphor understanding. The discussion is based on the relevance-theoretic account, which explains the subconscious inferential processes involved. However, it leaves open the question of the potential impact of conscious availability of the tension between literal and figurative meaning, which is reminiscent of domain mappings in Cognitive Linguistics. Within metaphor research, a focus on awareness offers valuable findings for cognitively oriented schools of thought.
Typologizing grammatical complexities
Authors: Good Jeff
Published: March 2014

An important theme in work attempting to situate creoles with respect to non-creoles typologically is the extent to which it can be said that creole grammars are relatively simple from a cross-linguistic perspective. Work arguing for and against this position has generally focused on an examination of the synchronic grammars of creoles in order to show that they are either simple or complex in one way or another. By contrast, there has not been a detailed examination of two important related questions: How can we typologize grammatical complexities themselves? And, once we have typologized them, will we find that different types of complexities are affected differently during creolization? This paper examines these questions and proposes that distinguishing between complexities derived from paradigmatic structure as opposed to syntagmatic structure may yield important insights into apparent patterns of simplicity within creoles, in particular with respect to which complexities we might expect to be readily transferred from source languages into an emerging creole.
Creolization and admixture
Authors: Plag Ingo
Published: March 2014

Proponents of a ‘feature pool’ approach to creolization (e.g. Mufwene 2001, Aboh & Ansaldo 2006) have claimed that the emergence of the new grammar is driven by the syntax-discourse prominence, markedness, and frequency of available features, with typological similarity or dissimilarity of the languages involved playing a crucial role in the competition and selection process. This paper takes a closer look at the predictions of a feature pool-based approach to creolization and tests whether these predictions are borne out by the facts. Three case studies from the Surinamese creoles and Sri Lanka Malay show that the feature pool approach suffers from a number of conceptual, theoretical, and empirical problems. The typology alone of the languages involved in the contact is not a good predictor for the outcome of language contact. The feature pool approach neglects processing constraints: one can only select from what one can process. ‘Creolization’, as in the case of the emergence of the Surinamese Creoles, is not ‘exceptional’, but happens in contact situations in which second language acquisition plays a significant role. The processing restrictions inherent in second language acquisition play an important role in shaping the structural outcome. ‘Admixture’, as in the case of Sri Lanka Malay, is not ‘exceptional’ either, but happens in different situations and shows different processes at work. And these processes allow structural outcomes that are very different from those found under the conditions of second language acquisition.
Semantic annotation of Italian legal texts
Authors: Venturi Giulia
Published: March 2014

The FrameNet approach to text semantic annotation can be a reliable model to make the linguistic information and semantic content of legal texts explicit. This hypothesis is discussed and empirically demonstrated through a trial of annotating a corpus of Italian legal texts. This study aims to show that FrameNet is particularly appropriate to provide new perspectives for legal language studies and for legal knowledge representation tasks. Moreover, by relying on the output of a statistical dependency parser, the FrameNet-based annotation methodology presented here can be used successfully in the automatic semantic processing of legal texts.
1. Interpreting or interfering?
Authors: Tebble Helen
Published: March 2014

There is an ever growing need for community or public service interpreting around the world yet there is great disparity between both the quality and availability of educational courses for community interpreters. This chapter focuses on the Australian context and assumes a community interpreter is qualified in interpreting with an undergraduate degree or postgraduate qualification in interpreting/translating, has national accreditation and is subject to the ethics of AUSIT. The AUSIT code of ethics is examined to reveal its operational code which allows the interpreter to coordinate the metalingual function of the interpreted dialogue, permission for which can emanate from the contract, a specific stage of the genre of the interpreted consultation. Empirical data from a major project in medical interpreting are discussed to show how this metalingual function is used to coordinate and repair talk or interpreting that has broken down due to human error and frailty. Such explicit coordination can work nearly as well as implicit coordination, the normal work of an interpreter. The two types of coordination are considered successful interpreting as distinct from intentional interference by the interpreter who would add or omit or attempt to coordinate beyond the specific professional role of the interpreter.
4. Ad hoc interpreting for partially language-proficient patients
Authors: Meyer Bernd
Published: March 2014

The article discusses the notion of ‘language barrier’ regarding communication with patients with a migration background. These patients usually show some level of proficiency in the official language of the hospital. However, their proficiency is usually limited so that they still need interpreters to communicate effectively with medical staff. Thus, the language constellation between participants is partly “transparent”, to use Müller’s (1989) term. Based on two case studies it will be shown that the forms of participation of interpreters in such interactions are influenced by the specific multilingual competencies of the patients.
5. Code-switching and coordination in interpreter-mediated interaction
Authors: Anderson Laurie
Published: March 2014

This chapter describes and compares code-switching (CS) by lay participants and institutional representatives in data involving English-speaking migrants collected in legal and healthcare settings in Northern Italy. In both settings CS by foreign end-users is found to be relatively common in sequentially ‘reactive’ positions; with the exception of nonce borrowings, lay participants take the initiative in CS more rarely, mainly when pressing personal concerns are at issue. CS by institutional representatives shows a functional sensitivity both to broad institutional aims and to the specific sub-aims of the various phases of the encounter; its greater prevalence in the healthcare setting can, it is argued, be traced to the need to create a collaborative relationship in order to successfully diagnose and treat the patient. Implications of the results for theories of mediated interaction and for the training of community interpreters are discussed.