bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Code alternation patterns in bilingual family conversations
Authors: Georgalidou Marianthi , Kaili Hasan , Celtek Aytac
Published: March 2014

In this study, we analyse conversations recorded during ethnographic research in the Greek/Turkish bilingual community of Rhodes within a Conversation Analysis (CA) framework. Our data comprise recordings of everyday talk-in-interaction during bilingual family gatherings. We examine aspects of the overall and sequential organization of talk as well as issues of identity based on the code alternation choices speakers of different ages and social groups make during interaction.
Children’s switching/shifting competence in role-playing
Authors: Katerbow Matthias
Published: March 2014

This paper – part of a larger study on the acquisition of variation in a Moselle-Franconian village (Wittlich/Eifel) – deals with data from children’s natural peer-group interactions during salesperson–buyer role-play. While analyzing this data, a large amount of intracontextual variation was observed. This variation is explained by the fact that the children, who are between the ages of 3;11 and 6;10, have acquired specific registers, i.e. a role-play register and a peer-directed register.
Chain shifts revisited
Authors: Moosmüller Sylvia , Scheutz Hannes
Published: March 2014

In this contribution, two consecutive sound changes, the Viennese monophthongisation and the E-merger, are investigated. Both sound changes originated in the city dialect of Vienna and spread to other Austrian dialects, including the city dialect of Salzburg. Whereas in the city dialect of Vienna the monophthongisation was completed around 1940 leading to two new vowels in the vowel inventory, this process is still in progress in Salzburg. Consequently, the vowel inventories of the two dialects differ with respect to the number of vowels. Traditionally, it has been assumed that the Viennese monophthongisation caused the confusion and subsequent merger of the E-vowels. However, a comparison of the two city dialects reveals that the two changes must have occurred independently of each other.
A town between dialects
Authors: West Helen Faye
Published: March 2014

Speakers’ psycho-social orientation and social knowledge have often been identified as having an important role in linguistic change. We know, for example, that speakers’ adoption of linguistic features from a neighbouring region often correlates with their positive social orientation towards that region (Llamas 2007), and that their social orientation can be discussed with reference to their interpretation of physical, political and social ‘boundaries’ (Llamas 2010). Southport, located 17 miles north of the large industrial city of Liverpool, is historically an independent borough but was absorbed into Merseyside in 1974. Southport and Liverpool are well connected by frequent transport links and, given the high levels of contact between people, it has been predicted that phonetic features of the Liverpool accent will diffuse into the traditional Lancashire accent of Southport (Grey & Richardson 2007). However, a complicating factor is Liverpool’s negative stereotype (Montgomery 2007), which may be predicted to act as a barrier to the diffusion of Liverpool features. This paper aims to analyse the diffusion of two local Liverpool features – the lenition of intervocalic and word-final /t/ and /k/ – in speech from a corpus of 39 speakers stratified by age, gender and socio-economic status. I show that despite the links between the two locations, the features of Liverpool are not diffusing into Southport speech as rapidly as originally hypothesised. The second aim is to investigate whether there is a correlation between speakers’ language use and their spatial mobility patterns by mapping their external (contact) and extra-linguistic (attitudinal) behaviour onto their linguistic production. I show that varying patterns of contact could provide an explanation for the reduced level of diffusion of Liverpool features. In conclusion, I argue that understanding speakers’ psycho-social orientations and social awareness, in conjunction with correlative patterns of speech production is crucial for explaining language change.
Variation of sibilants in Belarusian-Russian mixed speech
Authors: Zeller Jan Patrick
Published: March 2014

Due to the intensive and extensive contact of Belarusian and Russian, mixed Belarusian-Russian speech is a widespread phenomenon in the linguistic landscape of Belarus today. Along with features on other linguistic levels, phonetic-phonological features that differ between both languages appear as variants in such mixed speech. This paper reports an acoustical analysis of three sibilant variables (sj), (tj) and (ʧ j) in instances of mixed speech spoken by 27 speakers. For (sj) and (tj), Center of Gravity calculations suggest a more posterior place of articulation for older speakers and a less posterior one for younger speakers. This is interpreted as a shift towards a more Russian-like pronunciation of younger speakers, which can be explained by an earlier and more intensive exposure to Russian. While no such intergenerational difference is found for (ʧ j), there is a relation between the realization of the two affricates (tj) and (ʧ j), suggesting some general principle of keeping distances between sibilants large enough.
Weird stories
Authors: Medved Maria I. , Brockmeier Jens
Published: March 2014

In the literature on autobiographical narrative, self, and identity construction, many researchers have taken narrative coherence as an important feature that reflects and shapes identity and sense of self. Commonly, this feature is defined and assessed in isolation, as if at stake were an autonomous text. We argue this approach is too narrow to represent things as complex as narrative, self, and brain. We explain this argument in discussing narratives by individuals with serious neuropsychological challenges: people who, due to illness or disability, cannot fully rely on their neurocognitive and narrative resources for their identity construction. We offer a broader view of the issue of coherence in autobiographical narrative that goes beyond a decontextualized concept of narrative, especially, by including (i) the intersubjective context in which stories are told, (ii) the larger autobiographical context of their narrator, and (iii) the wider socio-cultural context in which narratives and narrators are situated. Using narrative excerpts from adults with acquired brain injuries and neurocognitive disabilities, we point out how what is seen as (narrative) coherence of one’s brain, mind, and self changes when these contexts are taken into account.
Identity, self, narrative
Authors: Hydén Lars-Christer
Published: March 2014

By tradition many narrative researchers interested in questions about identity have focused on interview narratives and especially on their discursive organization in terms of coherence and referentiality. This paper argues that other aspects than coherence are of importance in negotiating identity. Examples are taken from narrative research to show the ways in which persons with dementia illnesses, brain injuries, and related problems actually use and tell stories in order to claim various identities. There is a special focus on the way the storytelling activity and all kinds of expressive resources are used in order to establish and negotiate identity.
Broken narratives, visual forces
Authors: Tamboukou Maria
Published: March 2014

In this chapter I look into letters and paintings of Gwen John’s, an expatriate Welsh artist who lived and worked in Paris in the first half of the twentieth century. John’s epistolary narratives and paintings are placed within a conceptualization of time as duration, a continuum where past, present and future coexist and wherein sequential linearities are broken, nomadic subjectivities emerge and forces of narratability are released. What I argue is that John’s letters and painting create a plane for broken narratives and visual forces to be explored as events that form a different image of thought about the ethics and aesthetics of what human communication entails.
Artists-in-progress
Authors: Sandino Linda
Published: March 2014

Following Paul Ricoeur’s formulation of narrative identity as the dialectic of sameness (idem-) and change (ipse-)identity, this chapter explores the trope of incompleteness in extracts from two artists’ life stories to suggest that the synthesizing totality of the life history is continually interrupted, or broken, by accounts of new creative directions and the search for symbolic expression which mark the ipse-identity of the artist’s selfhood. A coherent identity does not just refer to the singularity of that self but must also contend with the ascription of ‘artist’, the historical and cultural contingency of which is made manifest in the testimony of the life stories. Rather than seeing narrative emplotment leading towards a culmination or conclusion [“I became an artist”], narrative constitutes the means whereby the ‘discordant concordance’ of the temporal aporia of becoming and being an artist is enabled via the reflective ipseity that marks narrative identity’s fractures and disruptions.
Becoming a narrative inquirer
Authors: Clandinin D. Jean , Huber Janice , Steeves Pam , Li Yi
Published: March 2014

Our teaching of narrative inquiry, shaped by a conceptualization of narrative inquiry grounded in a Deweyan theory of experience, works from a view of experience as embodied, always in motion, and shaped and reshaped by continuous interaction among personal, social, institutional and cultural environments. Given this experiential grounding, narrative inquiry is much more than telling or analyzing stories. Our focus is on learning to think narratively, that is, on learning to think with stories. Learning to think with stories highlights the relational, multiperspectival processes in which participants and narrative inquirers inquire into their lived and told stories attentive to the dimensions of temporality, sociality and place and with a focus on retelling and reliving lived and told stories in more thoughtful and responsive ways in the future. Through a series of storied moments, we show ways in which we intentionally create small responsive communities of sustained conversation enabling students to tell aspects of their lives through engaging in diverse narrative inquiry activities. We then illuminate the transformational power of response as lives meet within the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space and each teller is supported in retelling his/her stories in more attentive ways. As students learn to attend to their experiences in narrative ways each teller awakens to new ways of knowing and becoming a narrative inquirer.
Teaching narrative inquiry in the Chinese community
Authors: Ming Yu Wai , Kwok Lau Chun
Published: March 2014

While narrative inquiry has become a significant voice in the educational field in Europe and North America, its development is just beginning in the Chinese communities including Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. It is interesting to see how narrative inquiry has been developing in these places with different language and cultural backgrounds in recent years. In this chapter, we will examine this development from our vantage point in Hong Kong and share our own experience in using and teaching narrative inquiry in teacher education. We have tried to promote narrative inquiry in three ways: as a tool for research or inquiry, as a medium for teacher professional development, and as a teaching strategy. In the light of our experience on teaching narrative inquiry in the teacher education context, we also share our reflections and concerns in creating a space for its development in both Hong Kong and other regions in the Chinese landscape.
Multicultural and cross-cultural narrative inquiry
Authors: Phillion JoAnn , Wang Yuxiang
Published: March 2014

In this chapter the authors, one an experienced narrative inquirer and one a novice narrative inquirer, engage in a dialogue about learning and teaching narrative inquiry across languages, cultures and geographic contexts. The focus is on the advisor and advisee collaborative learning that occurs as they discuss the advisee's project. The primary purpose of the chapter is to explore the learning and teaching of narrative inquiry within research conducted with marginalized student populations in international, multicultural contexts. A form of narrative inquiry that builds on current work in narrative inquiry, termed “multicultural and cross-cultural narrative inquiry” (Phillion 2008; Phillion & M. He 2009), is discussed within the dialogue and reflection on the dialogue. This form of narrative inquiry uses critical perspectives and has an explicit social justice orientation. Key issues that narrative inquirers engaged in this form of inquiry need to consider are discussed: role of researcher, context, theory, and representation. One narrative inquiry on Hui (Muslim) minority students in P.R. China is presented to demonstrate the particular qualities of this form of inquiry. Dilemmas and concerns associated with this form of inquiry are addressed within the context of learning and teaching narrative inquiry.
‘Burt's story reminded me of my grandmother’
Authors: Trahar Sheila
Published: March 2014

The common elements that link the approaches to the practice of reflecting teamwork that have been developed in different contexts such as family therapy, anthropology, collaborative research and management education are that they are informed by poststructuralist and non-structuralist understandings of life and identity. Within such understandings, identity is a social and public achievement, negotiated within social institutions and communities and shaped by historical and cultural forces. In the reflecting team forum people have the opportunity to tell some of the significant stories of their lives and to experience how those stories affect, are familiar to, interest or stimulate memories of experiences for others. Dominant knowledges are challenged and local knowledge is valued as new layers of meaning emerge from the process. This chapter offers a critical evaluation of the experimental use of a reflecting team to teach narrative data analysis with a group of doctoral students. Drawing on my reflections and those of Alison and Titina, the two conversants, who stimulated the reflecting team conversations, it proposes that the reflecting team activity revealed much potential for development as a pedagogical practice.
egotiating intercultural academic careers
Authors: Hellstén Meeri , Goldstein-Kyaga Katrin
Published: March 2014

Research into the influences on academic work of professional life stories and contextual adaptability is gaining ground. There is an increase in the use of ‘self-study’ as a method for explaining the diverse work demands in the academic profession. This chapter reports on two such stories narrated by university lecturers. The aim is to illuminate and discuss academic and professional pathways to current professional situations by way of two senior university lecturers' conversations. The academics grew up and pursued their educational and professional careers in different social, cultural, linguistic, economic and political contexts, but are currently working at the same university. In their stories we explore how and in what ways their different contexts have influenced them as professional university teachers and researchers. By so doing, we use these stories to interpret the world or worlds in and through which the two have interacted on their way to academia and thus view their stories as social products constructed in the context of specific social, historical and cultural locations. Stories are here viewed as sources of ‘coming to know’ through which the two represent themselves and their worlds as well as construct personal identities as professionals. In the stories we link the past to the present as the two give meaning to their lives as these have been negotiated academically and professionally. Though stories speak for themselves they require interpretation when used as data in social research. Our model of narrative analysis is more of thematic analysis that places emphasis on the content of the story as a text. With identity construction as professionals we do also have a performative view dealing with how narrators want to be known, and precisely how they involve the audience in “doing” their identities. Through the two narratives presented in the chapter, we make links to how they can be utilized pedagogically to enable the accomplishment of new learning in the intercultural higher education context.
Chapter 2. Axes of identity
Authors: Freeman Mark
Published: March 2014

This chapter explores the notion of persona, focusing on two interrelated “axes” of identity, the first tied to time and the second to what might be termed “relatedness to the Other.” Drawing especially on William James’s seminal reflections on self and identity, it is suggested herein that an important aspect of identity concerns the degree of congruence, or lack thereof, between the various stories told by oneself and others about the meaning and movement of one’s life. Also important, in James’s view, is the issue of personal continuity and how it might best be understood. These ideas, taken together, lead him to conceptualize identity in essentially narrative terms. In order to address the notion of persona via the idea of narrative identity, I turn to Keith Richards’s recent book Life (2010), which provides a vivid illustration of the process of negotiating one’s own and others’ perspectives on who and what one is. For Richards, the widely-circulated public images that had been on display throughout much of his life had been in tension with what he regarded as his innermost interests and desires: In Jamesian terms, his Spiritual Self had been belied by the rather more colorful Social Selves on view. By Richards’s own account, these images had been folded into his identity, such that it became difficult to disentangle the authentic person from the persona. Ultimately, there may be no way of doing so. This does not mean abandoning the idea and ideal of personal authenticity, however. On the contrary, it means reimagining it, in full recognition of the multiple paths through which narrative identity comes into being.
Chapter 4. Constructing perspectives as positioning resources in stories of the self
Authors: Lucius-Hoene Gabriele
Published: March 2014

Perspectivation – verbal practices to represent perspectives – can be used in personal storytelling to negotiate moral claims which are crucial to the teller’s self. The perspectives of different interactants in the story-world can show up in complicated fusions or as contested battlefields, contrasting, backing or commenting each other. Preferably in reported speech and scenic re-stagings of episodes, the narrator as “almighty author” can shape or frame the voices of problematic interactants within the story by means of rhetorical devices, which enables him to gain authentification and persuasive power while refraining from explicit evaluations.
Chapter 6. Strange perspectives = strange (narrative?) identities?
Authors: Heinze Rüdiger
Published: March 2014

Narrative is a constitutive element of our knowledge of and communication about world and self. A key element of narrative and our understanding of it is the (re-)construction of perspective and the specific kind of narrative identity this perspective projects and pre-figures. If our understanding of fictional narratives is based on real-world experiential cognitive parameters, how do we deal with texts that cannot be fully grasped in accordance with these parameters, and what effects do these “unnatural” texts have on everyday storytelling? This essay discusses fictional narratives and narrative perspectives that transcend mimetic and experiential theories of interpretation and narrative in various forms and manners. It asks how, why and with which consequences for our conceptions of narrative identity fictional narratives go beyond our everyday experiences and cannot be fully explained in terms of real-world experiential cognitive parameters. This essay aims to show how fictional narratives and “unnatural” perspectives open up new horizons and narrative identities, specifically ways of world-making, and that our appreciation for this “unnaturalness” leads to a more profound understanding of these narratives as well as our knowledge of world and self.
Travelling metaphors, transforming concepts
Authors: Hyvärinen Matti
Published: March 2014

This volume discusses the travelling concepts of narrative. But what do we understand by “travelling concepts”? I address this issue by reading Mieke Bal, who originally suggested the term, and by scrutinizing the metaphor of travel itself. Do we assume that the concept of narrative has remained the same over the course of its travels? The chapter suggests that there are many levels to consider in using the term travellers: the abstract idea and metaphor of narrative, the concept, the narrative theory. Instead of mere travel, the concept of narrative itself has changed, often covertly, but with substantial consequences. The chapter discusses the difference between top-down and bottom-up approaches to narrativity in social research. The metaphorical discourse on narrative has enlarged the concept’s range of reference substantially and too far afield for many commentators, while keeping the criteria of the concept formal and conventional. The end of the chapter examines these narrative metaphors of life critically, finally by discussing the manner in which Ian McEwan’s novel On Chesil Beach thematizes and contests ubiquity and portability of narrative as a concept and metaphor.
Global and local connections in Mandarin-speaking children’s narratives
Authors: Sah Wen-hui
Published: March 2014

This study examined Mandarin-speaking children’s development in relating narrative events in terms of both global and local connections. Thirty Mandarin-speaking five-year-olds, 30 nine-year-olds and 30 adults participated. The narrative data were elicited using Frog, where are you? The plot-structure and the goal-plan schemes were used to examine participants’ ability to maintain global connections; a complex event and a sequence of events were chosen to assess local connections. The results displayed children’s significant progress in establishing global connections and in employing goal-plan knowledge. Regarding local connections, children exhibited increasing ability to encode and to integrate essential event components. Findings suggest that five-year-olds had insufficient ability to establish both global and local connections. Nine-year-olds were more advanced in encoding global connections; however, they were inadequate in integrating event components and in chaining a sequence of events at the local level. Adults could properly relate narrative events at both levels and were more likely to encode characters’ internal responses to enhance thematic coherence. Results were considered in relation to capacities for working memory, theory of mind and integration. Narrators’ differences in communicative competence and cognitive preferences were also discussed.
Socioeconomic differences in Taiwanese children’s personal narratives
Authors: Lai Wen-Feng
Published: March 2014

This chapter investigated how five-year-old Taiwanese children of three socioeconomic statuses performed personal narratives. The participants comprised 60 children, 40 were from working-class families: half of the children’s mothers were foreign brides from Southeast Asia countries (cross-border marriage group) and half were local Taiwanese (typical working-class group). An additional 20 children were recruited from middle-class local families. Children’s vocabulary was assessed and they were individually interviewed regarding three past experiences. Data were transcribed verbatim and analyzed at the clause level according to the rules of the Child Language Data Exchange System. Primary findings include, first, middle-class children outperformed children from the two working-class groups in vocabulary ability. Second, there were no significant between-group differences in narrative length or the use of internal state terms. Third, middle-class children used significantly more temporal conjunctions than children of cross-border marriages. Forth, middle-class children outperformed typical working-class Taiwanese children who, in turn, outperformed children of cross-border marriages in narrative structure.
A study of narrative development of young Chinese children with specific language impairment aged four to six years
Authors: Zhang Fangfang
Published: March 2014

This study investigates the narrative development of Chinese Children with specific language impairment (SLI) aged from four to six in three dimensions – structure, evaluation and temporality. The data comprised personal narratives of a cross-sectional corpus with sixty children with typical development (TD) and a longitudinal corpus over twenty months with age-matched children with (n = 3) and without SLI (n = 3) starting at the age of four. The main findings were that the SLI group’s narrative structure is lower than that of their peers with typical development in length, components, and appropriate use of codas, though they show a rapid growth in narrative structure from the age of four to six. Second, children with SLI produce significantly fewer evaluations than their peers with TD. With age, evaluation in children with SLI develops very slowly. Third, compared to the group with TD, children with SLI show less diversity of vocabulary and types of expressions of temporality. But their temporal ability grows rapidly with age. The lower narrative competence of children with SLI supports the cognitive processing deficit account of this population. Evaluation presents the primary area of difficulty for children with SLI. Future intervention should be focused in this direction.
Narratives of Mandarin-speaking patients with schizophrenia
Authors: Hsu Ning , Cheung Hintat , Wang Enan , Chou Tai-Li
Published: March 2014

Schizophrenia is characterized by abnormalities in perception and expression. The traditional view of their disordered speech as a reflection of their disorganized thinking (Bleuler, 1950; Kraepelin, 1919/1992) has been questioned for the reason that language and thought are not in total isomorphic relationship. The disordered speech observed in individuals with schizophrenia could be more than a mere thought disorder or a mere language disorder (Harvey & Neale, 1983; McKenna & Oh, 2005). The present study investigated the narrative ability of Mandarin-speaking patients with schizophrenia. A group of 22 patients with schizophrenia as well as 20 normal controls participated in a story-telling task. Participants were asked to narrate three picture-books and their performance was evaluated by a Mandarin version of Narrative Assessment Profile (Tsou, Chang, & Cheung, 2009), which examines eight dimensions of a narrative: topic maintenance, event sequencing, reasonableness, referential skill, background information, evaluation, conjunctive cohesion, and the overall narrative pattern. Lexical choices of connectives (causal connectives and contrastive connectives) as well as verbal predicates (perceptual verbs, psychological verbs, and mental verbs) were also analyzed. Results showed that participants in the schizophrenic group preserved an intact ability to produce basic elements in narratives, performing comparatively well in dimensions of event sequencing and referential skill. However, their performance in the other six dimensions was significantly weaker than the controls. It is proposed that individuals with schizophrenia display an overall lack of structure in narratives, as reported in previous literature (Chaika & Alexander, 1986; Lysaker et al., 2005). They seemed to have difficulties in coping with the communication needs of their listeners, as revealed by lower scores in reasonableness, background information, and evaluation. Further evidence came from lexical analyses which also showed that the group with schizophrenia used fewer contrastive connectives and mental verbs when telling their stories. Discussions on the implications of these findings are considered.
Grammaticalization in Chinese
Authors: Bisang Walter
Published: March 2014

The present paper shows that constructions are the driving force of grammaticalization in Chinese. It will be argued that this is due to two typological properties: the relative freedom with which a lexical item can be assigned to different grammatical functions (precategoriality in Late Archaic Chinese) and the ease with which one and the same surface structure can be subject to different syntactic analyses (Bisang 2009 on “hidden complexity”). The constructions that are relevant for grammaticalization in Chinese consist of slots that are associated with certain grammatical categories. Processes of reanalysis take place within these slots – a given lexical item is assigned the function associated with the syntactic slot in which it occurs. Such a construction-based account excludes continuity because the occurrence in a particular slot always leads to a discrete interpretation that is determined by the function associated with that slot. Continuity is only possible if two or more constructions are combined into a larger structure or if a new construction emerges. The former case will be illustrated by verbs in adpositional functions (coverbs), the latter by the resultative construction as it emerged in the 1st centuries AD. Finally, the constructional approach will also show that Aarts’s (2004, 2007) distinction between subsective and intersective gradience cannot be maintained.
Information structure marking in Sandawe texts
Authors: Eaton Helen
Published: March 2014

This article considers data from the Sandawe language (Khoisan, Tanzania) and discusses how information structure is marked in the language. Previous research on Sandawe has mainly been restricted to sentence-level investigations, with discourse being largely ignored. The research presented in this paper is based on a corpus of seven Sandawe texts which provide examples of how two morphemes, the realis pronominal clitic (pc) and the subject focus (sf) marker, are used to mark information structure. In addition to being discourse markers, ­these two morphemes have core grammatical functions, namely, marking the clause type and identifying the subject. Sandawe can thus be cited as a clear example of how languages may exhibit a close relationship between information structure and core grammar.
Topic and focus fields in Naki
Authors: Good Jeff
Published: March 2014

Naki, a mostly undescribed Bantoid language of Northwest Cameroon with svo as its canonical word order, makes use of an interesting information-structure encoding construction wherein a non-object focused element is shifted into immediately postverbal position. In this respect, Naki is similar to Aghem and Noni, two other languages of the area. However, unlike these languages, this word order shift is associated with special tone marking on the verb, and, in transitive sentences, it typically triggers fronting of objects to a preverbal position. This paper presents an analysis of this construction, situating it both with respect to general properties of Naki information-structure encoding and with respect to current theoretical approaches to information-structure sensitive word-order shifts. An important conclusion of the study is that Naki surface syntax seems better characterized in terms of linear fields than in terms of constituency trees.
On the obligatoriness of focus marking
Authors: Jacob Peggy
Published: March 2014

Based on new evidence, the paper describes the different strategies that are used to mark focus in Tar B’arma, a Nilo-Saharan language. The paper also addresses the question which factors determine the preference for one or another means to express focus. It explores conditions like the type of the focused phrase c(subject vs. non-subject focus) or the semantic interpretation of focus itself (presentational vs. contrastive focus), which are known to have an impact on the formal realisation of focus cross-linguistically. While the latter condition turns out to have no effect on focus marking in Tar B’arma, question-answer congruence mentioned in the typological literature is established as a factor ­influencing focus marking in an African language for the first time.
Verb-and-predication focus markers in Gur
Authors: Schwarz Anne
Published: March 2014

The article investigates the role of a group of cognate “ME”-particles in the complex focus systems of four Gur languages. On the basis of new data it is revealed that the particles have a presuppositional structure and mark narrow focus on the verb’s denotation or on verbal operators in varying degrees, depending on the language-specific interaction with other pragmatic particles and the aspectual system. The paper thus provides insights into the typology and dependency of verb-related foci, including truth-value focus, in less familiar languages.
Beneficiaries and recipients in Toba (Guaycurú)
Authors: Censabella Marisa
Published: March 2014

This paper examines the coding properties of benefaction in Toba, such as case marking, agreement and word order, as well as the alignment patterns in derived ditransitive clauses. Toba does not have non-derived ditransitive verbs with three obligatory arguments (agent, theme and recipient) but uses applicatives in order to incorporate more than two arguments in a clause. In clauses where the arguments appear as lexical noun phrases, the recipient or beneficiary argument of the ditransitive clause behaves as the patient of the transitive one, appearing in the same functional slot and behaving alike as to verb agreement. Only with the derived verb ‘give’ is it possible to clearly distinguish between a recipient and a recipient-beneficiary. Thus, following Kittilä’s (2005: 277) classification, Toba is a beneficiary-prominent language.
Benefactive and malefactive applicativization in Mapudungun
Authors: Zúñiga Fernando
Published: March 2014

This paper argues that two productive applicatives in Mapudungun, viz. -(l)el and -ñma, can be labeled benefactive and malefactive respectively, but only in a superficially impressionistic way. Based on a detailed survey of the literature on the language, as well as on synchronic evidence and some tentative internal reconstruction, I suggest that the yield of -ñma was originally probably neutral with respect to benefaction, and that it still is in some uses of this suffix. According to this account, the appearance of (l)el-applicatives (probably from elu- ‘give’ or el- ‘set’) gave rise to a privative opposition between the meaning of both morphemes with many bivalent predicates.
Beneficiary coding in Finnish
Authors: Kittilä Seppo
Published: March 2014

This paper examines the beneficiary coding in (Standard) Finnish. Finnish has an elaborate system of coding benefaction. Finnish uses two cases (allative and ablative) for this, in addition to which benefaction can be coded by an array of postpositions. As will be shown in the paper, the markers are not in free variation, but formal variation has a semantic basis. For example, the three types of beneficiaries (plain beneficiary, deputative beneficiary and recipient-benefactive) distinguished by Van Valin & LaPolla (1997) are relevant to beneficiary coding in Finnish. In addition, I will discuss beneficiary coding in light of other features, such as animacy, volition and transitivity of the denoted event.
Malefactivity in Japanese
Authors: Tsuboi Eijiro
Published: March 2014

This paper attempts to shed new light on malefactivity in Japanese by examining how the adversative interpretation obtains in the Japanese passive constructions, both as a fully grammaticalized constructional meaning and a context-dependent interpretation. Our analysis reveals the general mechanisms underlying the adversative semantics and concomitant syntactic behavior such as valency increase, as well as elucidating the way they interact with language-particular features characteristic of Japanese. The overall picture gained by our analysis points to the importance of viewing adversative constructions in a broader perspective, as something which emerges from the interaction of various factors in the dynamic processes of contextualization and grammaticalization.
Placeholder verbs in Modern Georgian
Authors: Amiridze Nino
Published: March 2014

Many languages have filler nouns like English thingummy, or German Dingsbums and Dingens, known also as ‘oblitive’ nouns. They refer to a person or thing whose name the speaker has forgotten, does not know or does not wish to mention. Modern Georgian has developed filler verbs that substitute for lexical verb forms in discourse, and thus function as placeholder verbs. This paper describes the form of the Georgian placeholder verbs and their use in discourse. Normally, the placeholder verbs are employed as a repair strategy in lexical access failure. However, the present paper deals with another use, namely, when placeholders are inserted in the speech intentionally, in order to make the implicated verb form either difficult or easy for the hearer to guess. Keywords: Placeholder verbs; Georgian; pragmatically motivated substitution; multiple agreement marking
Fillers and placeholders in Nahavaq
Authors: Dimock Laura
Published: March 2014

This discussion describes fillers and placeholders in spoken Nahavaq (Austronesian). Nahavaq has a wide range of syntactically-specific fillers which are related to various prefixes, some of which are synchronically unproductive. There are, for example, lexicalised placeholders (from ‘this thing’), which can function as nominal or verbal heads. There are also interrogative placeholders. These fillers and placeholders are distinguished in terms of their purpose, syntax, and prosody. Key words: Nahavaq; Austronesian; prosody; hesitation; filler
Should conditionals be emergent …
Authors: Van den Nest Daan
Published: March 2014

The present article examines asyndetic or conjunctionless conditionals in German and English. According to Jespersen’s Model (1940), this construction arose diachronically from a paratactic discourse sequence with a polar interrogative, but more recently Harris and Campbell (1995) have claimed that this model lacks any theoretical and empirical foundation. To demonstrate how asyndetic conditionals may emerge from discourse, this study reframes Jespersen’s Model in grammaticalization terms and adduces several constructional features in order to show that a grammaticalization process has actually taken place. In particular, this is achieved by applying traditional grammaticalization parameters such as bondedness, paradigmatic variability and specialization to synchronic and diachronic variation patterns with regard to clause integration, the finite verb of the protasis and the possible-world categories realis, potentialis, irrealis. The article also explores the relevance of speech-situation evocation to the formation of interrogative-based conditionals.
From manner expression to attitudinal discourse marker
Authors: Smessaert Hans , Van Belle William
Published: March 2014

In this study, we distinguish between three major subtypes of the Dutch adverb anders in terms of the concepts of comparison and phoricity. The criteria of proportionality, clefting and the interaction with negation are applicable to [+comparative/+phoric] Type I anders but not to [-comparative/+phoric] Type II anders nor to [-comparative/-phoric] Type III anders. The criteria of accommodation and the interaction with conjunctions apply to type II but not to type III, which is characterized positively as an attitudinal discourse marker. Word-order differences further underpin the proposed tripartition. Finally, our synchronic analysis of Dutch anders is put in the broader perspective of grammaticalization theory and its underlying formal criteria are related to the standard (diachronic) parameters and principles of grammaticalization.
Grammaticalization and lexicalization effects in participial morphology
Authors: Fried Mirjam
Published: March 2014

The study explores a particular functional shift (predication > modification) associated with a special participial form in Slavic, as attested in Old Czech. The purpose of the study is a close examination of the criteria that have been proposed as common manifestations of grammaticalization, in contradistinction to lexicalization, and the analysis leads to the conclusion that the observed categorial changes bear the features of grammaticalization. The partial transitions involved in the change are shown to depend on an intricate interaction between the morphosemantic structure of the participial form and certain recurring syntagmatic contexts in which it was used. These findings also argue for a Construction Grammar approach as a theoretically coherent basis for articulating plausible generalizations about complex diachronic shifts.
To dare to or not to
Authors: Schlüter Julia
Published: March 2014

This article revisits the alleged unidirectionality of grammaticalization, focusing on the marginal modal dare, which previous research has discussed as a potential counterexample. Being in its origin a member of the inhomogeneous group of modal auxiliaries, dare has since Early Modern English times developed certain full verb characteristics that would assign it a place near the lexical end of the grammaticalization scale. This study provides detailed corpus data, yielding a complex picture that defies an easy localization of dare on the lexical – grammatical scale: different verb forms of dare have to be distinguished, which appear to occupy different stages of evolution or even tend to drift into opposite directions. The results furthermore point to cross-cutting influences on the marking of dependent infinitives (rhythm, grammatical complexity).
Animacy and spatial cases
Authors: Creissels Denis , Mounole Céline
Published: March 2014

In the expression of spatial relationships, it is cross-linguistically common that human or animate nouns have particularities that distinguish them from other nouns. After presenting cross-linguistic data illustrating some tendencies observed in the behavior of human or animate nouns in spatial orienter function, this paper examines the contribution of Basque data to this question.
The coding of spatial relations with human landmarks
Authors: Luraghi Silvia
Published: March 2014

The paper discusses the coding of location and direction with respect to human entities, and analyzes the change undergone by the Latin coding system with its outcomes in the Romance languages. Latin features different coding strategies depending on whether location and direction relate to the interior of a landmark or to its vicinity; the former were used with inanimate landmarks, while the latter could be used with both inanimate and animate (human) ones. Most Romance languages do not continue this opposition. As a consequence, coding strategies for space expressions with human landmarks across the Romance languages display different patterns, which are described and discussed in the paper.
Behavioral Responses and the Impact of New Agricultural Technologies: Evidence from a Double‐blind Field Experiment in Tanzania
Authors: Bulte Erwin , Beekman Gonne , Di Falco Salvatore , Hella Joseph , Lei Pan
Published: March 2014

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in the social sciences are typically not double‐blind, so participants know they are “treated” and will adjust their behavior accordingly. Such effort responses complicate the assessment of impact. To gauge the potential magnitude of effort responses we implement a conventional RCT and double‐blind trial in rural Tanzania, and randomly allocate modern and traditional cowpea seed varieties to a sample of farmers. Effort responses can be quantitatively important—for our case they explain the entire “treatment effect on the treated” as measured in a conventional economic RCT. Specifically, harvests are the same for people who know they received the modern seeds and for people who did not know what type of seeds they got; however, people who knew they had received the traditional seeds did much worse. Importantly, we also find that most of the behavioral response is unobserved by the analyst, or at least not readily captured using coarse, standard controls.
TroX: a new method to learn about the genesis of aneuploidy from trisomic products of conception
Authors: Kermany Amir R. , Segurel Laure , Oliver Tiffany R. , Przeworski Molly
Published: March 2014

Motivation : An estimated 10–30% of clinically recognized conceptions are aneuploid, leading to spontaneous miscarriages, in vitro fertilization failures and, when viable, severe developmental disabilities. With the ongoing reduction in the cost of genotyping and DNA sequencing, the use of high-density single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers for clinical diagnosis of aneuploidy and biomedical research into its causes is becoming common practice. A reliable, flexible and computationally feasible method for inferring the sources of aneuploidy is thus crucial.

Results : We propose a new method, TroX, for analyzing human trisomy data using high density SNP markers from a trisomic individual or product of conception and one parent. Using a hidden Markov model, we infer the stage of the meiotic error (I or II) and the individual in which non-disjunction event occurred, as well as the crossover locations on the trisomic chromosome. A novel and important feature of the method is its reliance on data from the proband and only one parent, reducing the experimental cost by a third and enabling a larger set of data to be used. We evaluate our method by applying it to simulated trio data as well as to genotype data for 282 trios that include a child trisomic for chromosome 21. The analyses show the method to be highly reliable even when data from only one parent are available. With the increasing availability of DNA samples from mother and fetus, application of approaches such as ours should yield unprecedented insights into the genetic risk factors for aneuploidy.

Availability and implementation : An R package implementing TroX is available for download at http://przeworski.uchicago.edu/

Contact : kermany@uchicago.edu

Supplementary information:  Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
massiR
: a method for predicting the sex of samples in gene expression microarray datasets
Authors: Buckberry Sam , Bent Stephen J. , Bianco-Miotto Tina , Roberts Claire T.
Published: March 2014

Summary: High-throughput gene expression microarrays are currently the most efficient method for transcriptome-wide expression analyses. Consequently, gene expression data available through public repositories have largely been obtained from microarray experiments. However, the metadata associated with many publicly available expression microarray datasets often lacks sample sex information, therefore limiting the reuse of these data in new analyses or larger meta-analyses where the effect of sex is to be considered. Here, we present the massiR package , which provides a method for researchers to predict the sex of samples in microarray datasets. Using information from microarray probes representing Y chromosome genes, this package implements unsupervised clustering methods to classify samples into male and female groups, providing an efficient way to identify or confirm the sex of samples in mammalian microarray datasets.

Availability and implementation:  massiR is implemented as a Bioconductor package in R . The package and the vignette can be downloaded at bioconductor.org and are provided under a GPL-2 license.

Contact:  sam.buckberry@adelaide.edu.au

Supplementary information:  Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online