bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The acquisition of A- and A’-bound pronouns in Brazilian Portuguese
Authors: Grolla Elaine
Published: March 2014

Previous studies on the acquisition of pronouns have concentrated either on A-bound or on A’-bound (resumptive) pronouns. In both cases, children performed at chance-level. In this work, I argue that the poor performance is due to a single underlying cause. This conclusion receives support from results of tests I conducted with Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children, in which the same children performed poorly with both A-bound and resumptive pronouns. I follow Grodzinsky and Reinhart’s (1993) claim that children’s behavior is due to their limited working memory, but diverge from them in arguing that the problem resides in comparing syntactic computations, not semantic interpretations. The two analyses make different predictions for resumptive pronouns, where the interpretations for a derivation with a gap and a pronoun are the same and children still have problems.
Acquisition of focus marking in European Portuguese
Authors: Costa João , Szendröi Kriszta
Published: March 2014

This paper investigates whether children make the distinction between syntactic marking and prosodic marking of focus. The acquisition of focus marking provides a good testing ground to compare parametric and interface views on focus. If focus marking is parametric, children acquiring a language with syntactic focus marking should fail to comprehendmarked word orders. If a language marks focus only prosodically, they should initially fail to comprehend prosodic markedness. Crucially, in Portuguese, in which both strategies co-exist, children are expected to fail on both. The results show that children have problems with the prosodic strategy only, favoring an interface approach to focus.
The development of the syntax-information structure interface
Authors: Lozano Cristóbal
Published: March 2014

Recent acquisitional studies reveal that formal properties at the lexicon-syntax interface are in place before discursive properties at the syntax-discourse interface. It has been argued that this phenomenon results from learners’ deficits with interpretable discursive features like [focus]. This study claims that the phenomenon derives from learners’ deficits with the un-interpretable formal features responsible for regulating the occurrence of discursive focus, whereas learners’ representation of interpretable focus features are intact. This claimwas tested by conducting a study with Greek learners of non-native Spanish at three proficiency levels. Learners judged Subject-Verb and Verb-Subject order with intransitives (unergatives and unaccusatives), which is constrained both formally (Unaccusative Hypothesis at the lexicon-syntax interface) and discursively (presentational focus at the syntax-discourse interface). Results confirm that, while the general ‘syntax-before-discourse’ observation is correct, learners’ source of persistent deficits with discursive properties derives from the uninterpretable feature that regulates the syntactic realisation of focus. This implies that learners are sensitive to the (interpretable) [focus] feature, but are unable to grammaticalise it syntactically.
1. Form and meaning of diminutives in Lithuanian child language
Authors: Savickienė Ineta
Published: March 2014

The aim of this chapter is to discuss the acquisition of diminutives from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. Diminutives in Lithuanian present an interesting case not only in terms of morphopragmatics (a feature which is shared by Lithuanian as well as other languages), but also from a languagespecific point of view. We suggest that the early and frequent use of diminutives by the Lithuanian child is due to the fact that it facilitates the acquisition of declensional noun endings by restricting the number of paradigm patterns to 3 instead of the traditional 12 declension classes.
2. Diminutives in Russian at the early stages of acquisition
Authors: Protassova Ekaterina , Voeikova Maria D.
Published: March 2014

Two Russian children, a boy and a girl, were observed during the first steps of their use of diminutives. Having a different language proficiency and strategy of learning, the children under observation demonstrated a clear difference in the acquisition of diminutives: the early speaking girl Varja (as well as her mother) shows a high frequency of diminutives already at 1;6, whereas the later speaking Filipp reaches his maximum only about 2;0. It is argued that the most important pragmatic function of consciously used diminutives in cds as well as in cs is the creation of a familiar, personal world. The mothers try to familiarize the children with the surroundings, to make the world good for their children and to stress the relative smallness of the things that surround the children in contrast to those of grown-ups. Such distinctions are, in the Russian world, important both for the instruction and for the emotional comfort of a child. In addition, diminutives play an important role in facilitating the acquisition of case system: in the early phases both children use more indirect case forms of diminutives than of simplex nouns. This may be explained by the fact that diminutives end with similar codas. After children get a good command of using nominal case suffixes, this advantage of diminutives is of no help anymore.
12. Acquiring diminutive structures and meanings in Hebrew
Authors: Hora Anat , Ben-Zvi Galit , Levie Ronit , Ravid Dorit
Published: March 2014

The chapter describes an experimental study of the acquisition of derivational diminutives in Hebrew. The study population consisted of 48 children in four age groups: 5–6, 7–8, 10–11, 12–13, and adults. Participants were administered two tasks: an explanation task, and a production task. The learning curves we uncovered begin in kindergarten, with less than one quarter correct productions and about one third correct explanations, and they rise steadily from age 7–8 throughout grade school, especially between ages 9–12. Only from age 12 do Hebrew speakers show that they have mastered the morphological, semantic, pragmatic, and cognitive factors that interact in understanding and producing diminutive forms. Diminutive derivational morphology is thus part of what is termed ‘later language development’, that is, linguistic acquisition during the school years.
4. Three acquisition puzzles and the relation between input and output
Authors: Schönenberger Manuela
Published: March 2014

I discuss three puzzles arising from the study of two children acquiring Swiss German, a verb-second (V2) language which displays the verb-final pattern in embedded clauses. Before switching to the verb-final pattern the children use verb movement in embedded clauses which presents the following puzzles bearing on the relation between input and output. (i) The children generalize verb movement to all embedded clauses although a large proportion in the input unambiguously show the verb-final pattern. (ii) The children produce V2 in wil ‘because’-clauses, although the adults usually produced the verb-final pattern. (iii) One of the children still misplaces finite auxiliaries at age 8;0. In trying to solve these puzzles I draw a comparison between the child data and adult matrix clauses, and also note similarities between these acquisition data and diachronic English data.
6. Subject-object asymmetry in children's comprehension of sentences containing logical words
Authors: Armon-Lotem Sharon
Published: March 2014

This chapter investigates the influence of syntax, semantics and pragmatics on children’s understanding of sentences containing some and or, showing a subjectobject asymmetry. Chierchia, Crain, Guasti and Thornton (1998) showed that once the scalar implicature is erased (in the prediction mode), children accept that some could mean every (75%), and or could mean and (nearly 100%). 40 Hebrew-speaking children aged 3–6 were tested using eyzeshehu yeled forsome boy and o for or: 22 in the description mode and 18 in the prediction mode. Children accepted the use of inclusive or in the prediction mode (96%) but far less in the description mode (37%). For some, a subject-object asymmetry was found in both modes. In the prediction mode, the implicature was always erased in direct object position, but in subject position the implicature was only erased 40% of the times. Similarly, in the description mode, the scalar implicature was derived in two thirds of the cases in subject position, but in only a third of the cases in object position. This suggests that syntactic position contributes to children’s comprehension of sentences containing logical words and that both the difference between some and or and the subject-object asymmetry stem from specificity, a pragmatic condition which affects reference.
10. A cross-linguistic analysis of binding in Down syndrome
Authors: Perovic Alexandra
Published: March 2014

This chapter reports an investigation of the knowledge of binding in young adults with Down syndrome (DS), speakers of Serbo-Croatian, and compares it to that of English-speaking individuals with DS and typically developing controls. In line with data reported for English, Serbo-Croatian speakers with DS showed difficulties interpreting anaphoric elements. It is argued that these results point to a specific deficit in the grammar of DS: an inability to establish a syntactic relationship of binding between an anaphor and its antecedent. These results present evidence against the characterisation of language development in DS as delayed, since the pattern observed in this population cross-linguistically has not been observed during any stage of typical language development.
Exploring Mandarin Chinese speakers' L2 article use
Authors: Snape Neal
Published: March 2014

This paper attempts to explore the difficulties Chinese speakers have with the acquisition of English articles by situating itself within three hypotheses by using two tasks; a written forced choice elicitation task and an oral elicited picture description task. Our findings from the first task are consistent with the Fluctuation Hypothesis. Our findings from the second task are not fully consistent with the Representational Deficit Hypothesis or the strong interpretation of the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis as omission of articles is low. This indicates that L2 learners are perhaps able to access uninterpretable features and target-like prosodic representations even at intermediate levels, which is consistent with the view of full access to syntax and phonological structures via Universal Grammar.
Non-permanent representational deficit and apparent target-likeness in second language: Evidence from wh-words used as universal quantifiers in English and Japanese speakers' L2 Chinese
Authors: Yuan Boping
Published: March 2014

This paper reports on an empirical study examining L2 acquisition of Chinese wh-words used as universal quantifiers (UQs) by Japanese- and Englishspeaking learners. Results from a sentence acceptability judgment test and a sentence interpretation test indicate that wh-words can be acquired as UQs in English and Japanese speakers’ L2 Chinese grammars. However, the acquisition takes place rather late and there is evidence for representational deficit in beginner, intermediate and post-intermediate Japanese learners’ L2 Chinese grammars, i.e., wh-words in subject position can have target-like behaviours, but those in object position cannot. We argue that the underlying L2 Chinese representations in these learners’ L2 Chinese grammars are still divergent from that of the native Chinese grammar in spite of some apparently native-like behaviours.
Aspect and the Interpretation of Motion Verbs in L2 Greek
Authors: Tsimpli Ianthi Maria , Papadopoulou Despina
Published: March 2014

This study examines the role of aspect in L2 acquisition within the framework of the Interpretability Hypothesis (Tsimpli 2003; Hawkins and Hattori 2006). Aspect in Greek is a grammaticalized, interpretable feature affecting the argument structure and the telic/atelic interpretation of manner-of-motion verbs. As such, aspect is relevant to the syntax-semantics and the syntaxdiscourse interfaces. Native speakers and L2 learners of Greek were tested on the comprehension and production of manner-of-motion verbs. The results show that aspectual distinctions are appropriately used by L2 learners, at both interfaces. However, unlike native speakers, L2 learners rely more on lexical properties of prepositions and verbs than on grammatical aspect to encode (a)telicity. Moreover, L2 grammars of Greek seem to involve a one-to-one correspondence between perfectivity and telicity.
Une étude de corpus pour éclairer la question du verbe de l’incise en Français
Authors: Fairon Cédrick
Published: March 2014

This paper presents a corpus-based study of the class of French verbs like dire in Jean arrivera demain, dit Max, used to introduce indirect speech. We compare literary and press corpora and show that such 'comment clauses' have a different function in the two types of corpora, characterised by the use of different verbs, tenses, and punctuation marks. Our study shows that the commonly-accepted idea that the primary reporting verb is dire, and the most frequent tense is simple past, is not accurate.
Remarks on the Complementation of Aspectual Verbs
Authors: Ranchhod Elisabete
Published: March 2014

The notion of auxiliary verbs and their role is discussed within Z. S. Harris' transformational framework. Following Maurice Gross' proposals, the traditional approach to the subject, usually limited to verbal combinations, is extended to adjectival and nominal constructions. Such an approach to auxiliaries leads one to generalize the notion of auxiliary verb and to propose that aspectual verbs should have a syntactic status identical to that of tense auxiliaries; furthermore, it allows a coherent description of the aspectual verbs complementation.
The empirical basis of the analysis is constituted mainly by data from Portuguese but references to other languages are also made.
À propos de [pc-z.]
Authors: Muller Claude
Published: March 2014

French completives introduced by ce que are limited to prepositional complements, with two peculiar properties: the preposition, unlike adverbs, cannot be understood as an antecedent for the completive; the preposition does not need a consistant argument for its complementation. Among these constructions, only a very limited list authorizes a direct completive complementation with indirect interpretation – what was studied by Maurice Gross under the name [pc z.]. We analyse this property as the result of:
- the recoverability of the meaning of the preposition;
- the appositive ability of que (what we call +/- genitif);
- a semantic filter favoring a mental or psychological interpretation of the completive.
Déverbatif et diathèse en malgache
Authors: Rabenilaina Roger-Bruno
Published: March 2014

The nominalization or [Support] associate a sentence S2 which has nominal predicate with a sentence S1 which has verbal predicate by means of a Suppport verb. It concerns the non diathetic transformation, defined negatively as opposed to the diathetic transformation or [Diathesis]. The latter consist of focussing on the complement which is followed by the change of the voice of the verb and the link of the subject N0
transposed to the verb with the help of the enclitic preposition -na. But, the formation of derivatives called deverbal nouns calls out the nominalization as well as the diathetic transfomation. Such elements both behave like nouns and like verbs. So, as noun, a deverbal noun like fanasàna (washing) represents the head of the nominal group: Ny fanasàn'i Be ny fiara amin'ny vovo-tsavony (The washing of the car with the soap powder by Be), which can be derived from the active sentence in the present by [Support]: Manàsa ny fiara amin 'ny vovo-tsavony i Be (Be washes the car with the soap powder). But, as verb, the same deverbal noun fanasàna (act of washing habitually) represents the predicate of a sentence expressing the habitual action: Fanasàn 'i Be ny fiara ny vovo-tsavony (The soap powder is with which Be washes habitually the car), which can be derived from the habitual active sentence by [Diathesis]: Mpanàsa ny fiara amin 'ny vovo-tsavony i Be (Be washes habitually the car with the soap powder). The title implies then that in Malagasy the deverbal noun is categorially ambivalent: it concernes both a noun derived from a verb and a verb that the diathesis is marked.
Investigating the role of attention in phonetic learning
Authors: Guion Susan G. , Pederson Eric
Published: March 2014

Flege’s Speech Learning Model posits that adult second language learners retain the abilities of child learners for the perception and formation of novel phonetic categories. For novel categories to be formed, learners must discern at least some of the phonetic differences between the novel L2 and the closest L1 sound. However the model does not fully specify the mechanisms by which learners may come to discern relevant phonetic differences. This paper presents two studies investigating learners’ abilities to attend to novel perceptual dimensions and the effect of attention on discerning phonetic differences. In one study, English, Mandarin, Japanese, and advanced late-learners of Mandarin gave similarity judgments of synthesized tones. Mandarin listeners judged on the basis of both average F0 and F0 slope. English and Japanese listeners did not use slope, whereas advanced Mandarin learners did. This suggests that late-learners can learn to attend to novel perceptual dimensions. In the other study, English monolinguals were grouped into those instructed to attend to Hindi phonetic contrasts and those instructed to attend to sound-meaning correspondences of the same stimuli. For the novel [???-??] contrast, the sound-attending group showed better discrimination post-training. This suggests that with explicit directing of attention, adult learners can better discern novel phonetic contrasts.
Nativelike pronunciation among late learners of French as a second language
Authors: Birdsong David
Published: March 2014

This experimental study examines the pronunciation of a group of Anglophone late learners of French as a second language. Following Flege’s SLM, recorded read-alouds of word lists are subjected to acoustical analysis at the segmental level (vowel duration and VOT). At the global level of analysis, recorded readalouds of prose paragraphs are judged by native speakers. Nativelikeness is observed among some subjects across all tasks and levels of analysis. These results suggest that nativelike pronunciation is not out of the grasp of late L2 learners. We also examine the relationship between results at the segmental and global levels of analysis; some evidence suggests that performance at the global level predicts performance at the segmental level, but not vice versa. Also considered are the contributions to nativelike pronunciation of biographical factors such as motivation and phonetic training.
3. Natural language processing tools and CALL
Authors: Hamel Marie-Josée
Published: March 2014

Dans ce chapitre, nous nous proposons d’examiner la contribution du Traitement Automatique du Langage (TAL) en Apprentissage des Langues Assisté par Ordinateur (ALAO) avec une perspective sur l’enseignement du français. Le chapitre comporte deux sections principales. Dans la première, nous traitons de Tuteurs Intelligents (TI) puis, nous nous concentrons sur les TIs dédiés à l’apprentissage de la langue. On verra que dans ces systèmes d’Apprentissage des Langues Intelligemment Assisté par Ordinateur (ALIAO), les techniques de TAL occupent une place centrale, notamment celle de ‘parsing’. Notre deuxième section est consacrée à la description d’un système d’ALIAO nommé FreeText, qui vise des apprenants du français langue seconde de niveau intermédiaire à avancé. Il s’agit d’un riche environnement d’ALAO qui comprend un ensemble d’outils de TAL, lesquels ont été adaptés pour permettre de fournir aux apprenants un diagnostic ‘astucieux’ de leur intrant langagier. Nous concluons ce chapitre en discutant des avantages, dans le contexte de l’apprentissage d’une langue, du contact des apprenants avec les outils de TAL tels ceux développés dans FreeText.

This chapter examines the contribution of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL), in the perspective of French language instruction. It is divided into two main sections. The first presents an overview on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) and then describes a specific type of ITS, the Intelligent Language Tutor (ILT), where Natural Language Processing techniques, namely parsing, are core. The second main section focuses on one such ILT system called FreeText which is dedicated to intermediate-advanced learners of French as a second language. It is an enhanced CALL environment comprising a set of NLP tools, which have been adapted to provide FSL learners with a ‘smart’ diagnosis of their language input. The chapter concludes with a look at the overall benefit, within a language learning context, of learners’ exposure to the use of NLP tools, such as those found in FreeText.
10. Analyzing urban youth vernaculars in French cities: Lexicographical, variationist and ethnographic approaches
Authors: Pooley Tim
Published: March 2014

Alors qu’on constate un nivellement sociolinguistique avancé dans les français d’Europe, mais surtout en France, le langage vernaculaire des jeunes a parfois été présenté comme contre-exemple à cette tendance généralisée. Dans ce chapitre, je me propose de passer en revue tout d’abord les travaux à caractère lexicographique (dictionnaires et lexique), puis les études réalisées dans une optique variationniste – qu’il s’agisse du comportement ou des perceptions – et enfin quelques travaux à caractère ethnographique. Dans les dernières sections, je tente d’évaluer les travaux sur le français en attirant l’attention sur certains thèmes qui tiennent une large place dans les recherches sur les parlers jeunes des pays voisins, mais qui semblent absents des études consacrées à la France.

Against an overall national backdrop of sociolinguistic levelling in European varieties of French, particularly in France, youth vernaculars have sometimes been construed as a major counterexample to this general trend. Reviewing firstly work on dictionaries and lexicons, before moving on to variationist work carried out using behavioral and perceptual approaches and finally some examples of ethnographic work, this chapter then seeks to put the French work into perspective through a brief comparison with work in neighboring countries, drawing the reader’s attention to certain themes which appear important outside France but which are apparently absent from work on French youth slang.
Negotiation of meaning in the classroom: Does it enhance reading comprehension?
Authors: Van den Branden Kris
Published: March 2014

This study focuses on young children’s negotiation behaviour in the classroom. Through negotiating for meaning, children may unravel the meaning of difficult input or be pushed to produce more adequate and correct output. Previous research has shown that young children, while reading for comprehension, are able and willing to negotiate the meaning of words and phrases they do not understand. However, in the classroom, many variables prevent children from displaying their non-understanding, producing spontaneous output or negotiating meaning while doing so. Among the variables that determine the quantity and quality of negotiation routines during reading comprehension activities in primary school, the role of the teacher is a crucial one. On the basis of the reported classroom observation study, this chapter lists a number of recommendations as to how the quantity and quality of negotiation of meaning in primary school classes can be enhanced.
Second-person pronoun use in French-language blogs
Authors: Douglass Kate
Published: March 2014

This study explores particular features of the discourse of French-language blogs, both to provide a general understanding of the discourse of these blogs and to provide a model for teachers wishing to perform similar analyses with their students. The chapter begins with an overview of the format of blogs and their development in the francophone world, with a particular focus on France and Canada. Next, using a corpus-driven approach, ten French-language blogs are analyzed in terms of their interactional structure and the use of the second-person address pronouns tu and vous. The data demonstrate that both interactional structure and second-person address pronoun use patterns are highly complex and not consistently predictable based on blog category or country of origin. The chapter concludes with specific suggestions for accessing and analyzing French-language blogs, both in terms of tu and vous use and other aspects of language variation.
The discussion forum as a locus for developing L2 pragmatic awareness
Authors: Whitworth Kathleen Farrell
Published: March 2014

This chapter analyzes the discourse of two English-language discussion forums with different themes – weight management and dogs – in order to demonstrate how pragmatic functions (e.g., greeting, providing encouragement, requesting information, scolding) can be expressed by a range of linguistic structures. The analysis is theoretically grounded in Lave and Wenger’s (1991) view that learning should ideally be socioculturally situated within a Community of Practice (CoP). As such, the concept of the traditional (i.e., offline) CoP is contrasted with the hierarchy, norms, rules, and structures that exist in online communities. This type of contrast is vital to an understanding of online vs. offline social and cultural practices since some of the constructs (e.g., gatekeeping, explicit vs. implicit socialization) are fundamentally different. This chapter thus draws attention to the importance of considering participation and socialization of L2 learners in authentic contexts consistent within recent broad-based theoretical and empirical discussions in SLA (Hall, Cheng, & Carlson, 2006; Kasper, 2001; Kramsch, & Whiteside, 2007; Lafford, 2007; Swain & Deters, 2007). Findings show that CoPs can indeed be created online. Moreover, message boards are effective tools for language teachers and language learners.
General considerations on bilingual terminology extraction
Authors: Gaussier Eric
Published: March 2014

We want to present here general problems encountered in bilingual terminology extraction. Using French and English as the language pair to illustrate our discussion, we will first try to show how the specifications of terms in two different languages impact the alignment process. This will lead us to review three methods we believe to be well dapted to bilingual terminology extraction. Lastly, we discuss parameters a bilingual alignment model should integrate.
Software tools to support the construction of bilingual terminology lexicons
Authors: Hull David A.
Published: March 2014

Many problems in terminology translation can be solved by working with existing translated texts. However, large-scale bilingual lexicon building from previously translated documents takes a lot of human effort. This chapter describes an automatic terminology alignment algorithm that can be used as a valuable pre-processing step in the interactive process of lexicon construction. The system can present the human expert with a summary of the plausible translations of high enough quality that it can reduce the number of sentences which need to be read by roughly a factor of five in many cases. When compared to a manually constructed lexicon in a particular case study, the automatic system achieved a precision of 56% and an exact recall of 70%. In addition, more than half the remaining terms can be obtained with minimal edit operations on the extracted text.
Criticism under scrutiny
Authors: Salager-Meyer Françoise
Published: March 2014

In this paper, I specifically address the issue of the linguistic realisations of criticism in French, Spanish and English medical discourse written in the 19th and 20th centuries, the reasons why 19th century criticism was linguistically conveyed in a strikingly similar fashion in the three languages, and how and why in the closing years of the 20th century the discourse pattern of Spanish criticism started adopting the ‘politically correct’ tone of its Anglo-American counterpart. By placing the evolution of English, French and Spanish criticism in their broader educational, historical, political and socio-economic context, I argue the that behavioural changes observed in the framing of medical criticism reflect the evolution of increasingly competitive, collegial and pragmatic end-of-20th-century scientific research.
Processes underlying the development of pragmatic markers
Authors: Brinton Laurel J.
Published: March 2014

English(I) sayexhibits a variety of uses as a conjunction (meaning ‘suppose’), an adverb (meaning ‘about’ or ‘for example’), and a pragmatic marker (preceding questions, expressing surprise, evoking the hearer's attention, clarifying, or emphasising). Using the historical development of these forms as a test case of grammaticalisation, pragmaticalisation, lexicalisation, or idiomaticisation, this paper argues that despite being seen as ‘mirror images’, grammaticalisation and lexicalisation may be complementary processes, involving an increase in semantic opacity and the erasure of phrasal or morphological boundaries. However, the development of(I) sayis best understood as grammaticalisation as it involves decategorialisation from major to minor word class, the shift from referential to non-referential meaning, and the coding of invited inferences, all of which are typical of grammaticalisation.
Appropriateness and felicity conditions: A theoretical issue
Authors: Oishi Etsuko
Published: March 2014

The present paper gives a speech-act-theoretic explanation of the concept of appropriateness. In the speech act theory proposed in the present paper, the mechanism of performing an illocutionary act is explained as the process whereby a linguistic form, which represents a linguistic convention, becomes a linguistic artefact by the speaker’s act of uttering and the hearer’s uptake. Appropriateness and felicity conditions concern how such a linguistic artefact is created, and its analysis clarifies a specific relationship between an illocutionary act and context. Upon this interpretation, I examine the ways in which an utterance becomes appropriate or inappropriate, felicitous or infelicitous, and illustrate a construct of the internal context of performing an illocutionary act.
Cooperative conflict and evasive language
Authors: Berlin Lawrence N.
Published: March 2014

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, concerns surrounding the efficacy of United States intelligence and security agencies led to the formation of the 9–11 Commission. The Commission was charged to conduct a series of hearings to investigate “the truth” and possible culpability for the security failure. During the hearings, many high-ranking officials of the United States Government – past and present administrations – were called to give testimony. Exchanges between some of those officials (Secretaries of State) and their interlocutor-interrogators can best be described as “evasive”, representing a series of discursive tactics which produce nonlinear patterning between adjacency pairs. Yet, despite evidence that use of indirect, evasive language is not uncommon in courtroom discourse, the construction of evasion within these exchanges, especially along partisan lines, appears to be co-constructed, broadening the notion of cooperation to include complicity and suggest an expanded definition of what can be considered “appropriate”. Thus, in an order of discourse fraught with conflicting agents – interrogators and witnesses (and in this particular case, Republicans and Democrats), witnesses maintain the appearance of cooperation within the conflict by answering questions through changing the direction of the question, mitigating the force of the imposition, and deflecting responsibility from an action that could prove politically embarrassing or damaging. This chapter uses a critical discourse analysis framework to examine the mediated political discourse of these interactions, illustrating how cooperative conflict and its concomitant evasive language necessitate a layered analysis of context.
The attenuating conditional
Authors: Miecznikowski Johanna , Bazzanella Carla
Published: March 2014

The attenuative reading of the conditional form (condatt) in Italian and French illustrates the multifunctionality of linguistic structures and the necessity of analyzing them in their synergies with relevant contextual parameters. The condatt allows the speaker to allude to the existence of pragmatic prerequisites for his/her utterance without presenting them as taken for granted. An empirical study of spoken data reveals that at least in French this property has specific effects on various levels of interaction: the form expresses negotiability of the speaker’s acts; it preferredly encodes new information and contributes to structure the thematic progression of discourse; it tends to encode initiative and/or dispreferred communicative acts. These results lead us to formulate some hypotheses as to the condatt’s appropriateness with regard to global context. In particular, given that the form signals negotiability and is better compatible with a reduced rather than with a rich common ground, we expect it to be most appropriate in dialogical genres characterized by a low degree of acquaintance, a high degree of social distance between co-participants, and symmetry of social roles.
Metadiscourse across three varieties of English: American, British, and advanced learner English
Authors: Ädel Annelie
Published: March 2014

This chapter focuses on the pervasive phenomenon of metadiscourse, or reflexivity in language, looking at argumentative essay writing by university students. It presents a study of three varieties of English, using two corpora of native-speaker writing (British and American) and one corpus of advanced learner writing (L1 Swedish). Considerable differences are shown to exist in the use of metadiscourse, not just between the learners and the native speakers, but also between the British and American writers. The differences are evident both in general frequencies across corpora and in the functions the metadiscourse serves. Four factors are identified as potentially accounting for the variation found: genre comparability, cultural conventions, register awareness and general learner strategies.
Spanish language newspaper editorials from Mexico, Spain, and the U.S.
Authors: Pak Chin-Sook , Acevedo Rebeca
Published: March 2014

The study examines discourse patterns among various Spanish-speaking regions within one single genre of newspaper editorials, as compared to English language editorials. It focuses on the varieties of Spanish used by Latino communities in the United States as represented by El Diario (New York) and La Opinión(Los Angeles) and compares the findings with previous studies on the genre from newspapers such as The New York Times, El País (Madrid), and El Universal(Mexico). Rhetorical and stylistic features such as sentence and paragraph length and complexity, editorial titles, placement of the main topic and the use of attribution to sources as a device of argumentation were analyzed. The results demonstrate regional differences among various Spanish-speaking countries, and between the two Spanish-speaking areas in the U.S.
The rhetorical structure of academic book reviews of literature: An English-Spanish cross-linguistic approach
Authors: Suárez Lorena , Moreno Ana I.
Published: March 2014

Since the 1990s, there has been an increasing interest in the study of genres (Swales 1990). Recent research on the academic journal book review (BR) has shown that the BR in English is shaped according to a rhetorical structure that gives it genre status (Motta-Roth 1998). However, it is not known whether this rhetorical structure is shared by comparable texts in other languages. This chapter carried out an English-Spanish cross-linguistic study of the rhetorical structure of BRs on the basis of two comparable corpora of 20 BRs of literature in each language. The main results show that, despite sharing similar overall patterns of organization, the Spanish BRs of literature develop more descriptive moves and are less likely to end with criticism-loaded strategies.
Mapping multidimensional aspects of research: Reaching to intercultural rhetoric
Authors: Connor Ulla
Published: March 2014

This chapter traces the history of contrastive rhetoric and offers an agenda for expansion. Postmodern mapping methods are introduced to examine the effects of three major developments in discourse on the theory and methods of contrastive rhetoric research. The first map considers writing as a socially constructed activity and suggests that the study of writing should not be limited to texts but should consider the social practices surrounding it. The second map considers “small” cultures and draws attention to the important roles of disciplinary and other such small cultures. The third map introduces the study of writing as an intercultural encounter where writers are interacting in the production and comprehension of texts. Contrastive rhetoric needs to study writing as it is taking place in today’s instant and global message making environment, in addition to studying written products cross-culturally. The chapter argues for the expansion of the contrastive rhetoric research agenda and ends by proposing a name change to “intercultural rhetoric.”
An interactional approach to irony development
Authors: Kotthoff Helga
Published: March 2014

This article discusses conversational data from a project on how pupils use irony and related forms of communication. It employs a Bakhtinian and frame analytic approach combined with a pragmatics of presumptive meaning to understand what sorts of irony nine-year-olds use. Some types of irony correspond to teasing, others more to critical comments or joint fantasy production. The children in the study often perform an authoritative, ironic voice directed at the supervising university students, thereby showing their knowledge of typical adult voices and stances, and the students join in the irony by “playing along.” Irony thus helps the students and children to create an in-group that plays with its knowledge of offi cial and unoffi cial stances and unites in sharing unoffi cial perspectives and attitudes.
Using humor to do masculinity at work
Authors: Schnurr Stephanie , Holmes Janet
Published: March 2014

Workplaces constitute sites where individuals “do gender” while at the same time constructing their professional identities and meeting their organisation’s expectations. In most workplaces, a rather narrow range of masculine styles of interaction are considered normative. Discursive strategies associated with stereotypically masculine speech styles, as well as behaviours associated with the enactment of hegemonic masculinity are generally viewed as paradigmatic ways of interacting at work. Drawing on data recorded in a range of New Zealand professional organizations, this chapter investigates a range of ways in which normative masculinity is manifested in participants’ discourse, and how notions of masculinity are explored and exploited in workplace interactions. The investigation focuses on one particularly versatile discursive strategy frequently employed in talk at work, namely humor.
Cultural divide or unifying factor?
Authors: Chiaro Delia
Published: March 2014

This essay sets out to explore a positive aspect of bilingual cross-cultural couples in long term relationships, namely the occurrence of what is considered a harmonious factor: humour. The results of a purpose-built questionnaire completed by 59 couples sheds light on a series of socio and psycholinguistic aspects of their daily relationship including language choice and attitudes in the domain of the couples’ ludic interaction, such as when they joke with each other verbally and their use of humorous talk. This essay reports the findings of the processed data that emerged from the questionnaires as well as qualitative data deriving from a series of semi-structured interviews. I love you, I love you , I love you, that’s all I want to say, until I find a way, I will say the only words I know that you’ll understand, my Michelle. (Lennon-McCartney)
Re-fusing form in genre study
Authors: Devitt Amy J.
Published: March 2014

Current theories of genre based in action neglect form. While recognizing that genre study needed to reject earlier formalism, this chapter argues that genre necessarily encompasses form as part of the fusion of form, substance, and action and should be re-examined as contextualized form. Neither Carolyn Miller nor Mikhail Bakhtin, seminal genre theorists, rejected form but rather rejected formalism. Form in this chapter is defined as the visible results and notable absences of language-use in generic contexts, A contextualized treatment of generic form embeds form into its individual, social, and cultural contexts; recognizes generic form as variable individually, synchronically, and diachronically; balances treatment of generic forms as both unique and shared; and views generic forms as inter-genre-al, interacting with other genres.
A model for describing ‘new’ and ‘old’ properties of CMC genres
Authors: Heyd Theresa
Published: March 2014

While genre theory has become one of the central paradigms for CMC studies, these approaches face a dilemma: while they are often firmly rooted in the functionalist framework of ‘Swalesian’ genre theory, they strive to describe digital genres as new, emergent or at least hybrid – positions that are not easily reconciled. This paper suggests a way out by proposing a two-level structure for genre ecologies: a function-based superlevel that will usually be established from traditional discourse which branches into emergent subgenres on a lower, form- and content-based level. This two-level model is established in detail around the test case of digital folklore; it is also shown how the model can be extended to other domains of CMC discourse.
Tense domains in BP and EP – vP, CP and phases
Authors: Ambar Manuela , Negrão Esmeralda Vailati , Veloso Rita , Graça Luís
Published: March 2014

In this article we will deal with intriguing oppositions in Brazilian and European Portuguese in structures involving Aux-to-Comp, Complementizer Deletion and verbal complex gerunds versus adjunct gerunds licensing. The objectives of this paper are twofold: (i) to investigate to what extent those oppositions involve properties of the tense system and how these properties correlate; (ii) to understand whether the variation observed is or is not co-variation, identifying the properties responsible for it. We will posit that the oppositions described are the effect of the presence versus absence of V raising to the CP field in EP versus BP. Going back to work by Den Besten (1977) and following Ambar (2005, 2007), we will assume that the understanding of this phenomenon is to be seen in properties of Tense, conspiring for the following working hypothesis: BP has no V-to-C because V doesn’t move out of vP, EP has V-to-C because V can move out of vP.
Hebrew and Arabic children going Romance
Authors: Costa João , Friedmann Naama
Published: March 2014

In Hebrew, European-Portuguese, Spanish, and Palestinian-Arabic both SV and VS orders are possible. In the early stages of sentence construction, however, children acquiring these languages do not use the whole array of word orders in their language. Their word order preference differs in the different languages: in the first stage, Hebrew and European-Portuguese children use both SV and VS orders with unaccusative verbs, but only SV with unergative and transitive verbs. In Spanish and Palestinian-Arabic, on the other hand, children prefer VS order with unaccusative, unergative, and transitive verbs. We propose an account according to which children at this stage cannot move the subject outside of VP yet, and the cross-linguistic difference stems from the identification of Spell-Out Domains (Fox & Pesetsky 2004a). Spanish and Palestinian-Arabic allow the verb to appear before the subject, whereas Hebrew and European-Portuguese do not allow the verb to move to I until the Spell-Out domain widens beyond VP, which takes place after subject movement to Spec,IP is acquired.
On the nature of covert operations
Authors: Fernández-Soriano Olga
Published: March 2014

The phenomenon analyzed in this paper is instantiated by a type of pseudocleft structure in (oral) Spanish, characterized by the fact that when the element which is actually clefted (which is also marked as focus) is an internal argument, it can ‘extend’ its focal status to the constituents dominating it (VP/IP). As a consequence, in these constructions syntactic structure does not match semantic interpretation. This is (obligatorily) accompanied by a phenomenon of ‘relative reduction’: the relative pronoun in the relative clause does not spell out the features of the clefted element but those of the constituent which is actually interpreted as focus (i.e. the VP or the whole IP). The analysis proposed for this phenomenon is that there is a covert process of focus extension preceded by (also covert) reconstruction. In particular, we adapt the monoclausal analysis of English cleft structures (Kiss’ 1998) to pseudoclefts and claim that (identificational) focus propagates in a direct path to VP or IP thus accounting for the interpretation obtained. This account will be extended to other structures including a type of wh-structure, the so called ‘split interrogatives’.
Subject doubling in European Portuguese dialects
Authors: Martins Ana Maria
Published: March 2014

This paper discusses a subject doubling construction found in European Portuguese dialects where the impersonal clitic se is doubled by a strong pronoun/DP. The availability of subject doubling is explained under the hypothesis that dialectal se escapes the Case filter because it is .-incomplete (plural, but person-less). Se and its doubler begin as a single constituent (a “big DP”); later, the clitic se head-moves to T while the doubling pronoun/DP takes one of the positions available to EP subjects (preverbal or post-verbal). This analysis rightly predicts that: (i) there is no fixed word order between se and its doubler, (ii) the doubling pronoun/DP controls subject-verb agreement, (iii) the interpretation of the double subject is compositional (the doubler establishes the inclusive or exclusive reading of impersonal se). The analysis also enlightens why the clitic se can behave as the universal plural anaphora or the expletive subject of impersonal predicates in some dialects.
On the Quebec French interrogative particle tu
Authors: Morin Annick
Published: March 2014

The Quebec French interrogative particle tu is phonologically identical to the second person singular subject clitic (disregarding stress) and shows a distribution similar to that of clitic doubling, which is optional in this dialect. More specifically, it is subject to a definiteness effect, previously unnoticed in the literature, in that only definite subjects are acceptable in questions with tu. In this paper I argue that the distribution of the question particle tu and that of clitic doubling are both due to the presence of one feature, namely a Definiteness feature.