bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Through children’s eyes?
Authors: Thompson Paul , Sealey Alison
Published: September 2007

This article reports on an analysis of a small corpus of fiction written for children, extracted from the BNC. Quantitative analyses of most frequent words and sequences of words, and of parts-of-speech, were conducted, and compared with their equivalents in two other sub-corpora of the BNC, of adult fiction and of newspaper texts. The main findings point to some characteristics of both the fiction corpora which are very similar, and which contrast markedly with the news texts. However, more nuanced comparison of concordance lines in which the frequent items occur reveal subtle but telling differences between their use in context in adult fiction and in fiction written for children.
Definite article usage before Last/Next Time in spoken and written American English
Authors: Yoo Isaiah WonHo
Published: September 2007

Unlike any other noun in English, time can combine with either Ø last/next or the last/next and maintain the same reference, e.g. (The) last time I saw her, she was still in grad school. Nontemporal nouns cannot combine with Ø last/next, while the references of temporal nouns change with the use of the before last/next, e.g. In 2001, he said he’d come back Ø next year (= in 2008) vs. In 2001, he said he’d come back the next year (= in 2002). Based on the analyses of tokens retrieved from both spoken and written corpora, this paper describes when and how often the combines with last/next time in American English. Defining temporal nouns as nouns that refer to specific periods or points of time, this paper also argues that, contrary to what other scholars have suggested (e.g. Larson 1985), time is not a temporal but quasi-temporal noun.
Recent Progress in Corpus Linguistics in China
Authors: Wang Jianxin
Published: September 2007

This paper discusses some of the new developments in corpus linguistics in China. In the area of Chinese corpus compilation it presents large-scale text databases, representative corpora, annotated corpora, lexical databases for information processing, phonological, dialectal, spoken and other specialized corpora. In connection with the analysis and annotation of Chinese corpora, the characteristics of the Chinese language, word segmentation, tagging, parsing, and some corpus analytical systems are described. Concerning English corpus studies, some corpora of English as a Foreign Language and corpus-based research are depicted. On this basis tentative conclusions are drawn.
HKCAC: The Hong Kong Cantonese Adult Language Corpus
Authors: Leung Man-Tak , Law Sam-Po
Published: September 2007

An adult language corpus of spoken Hong Kong Cantonese (HKCAC) has recently been developed consisting of spontaneous speech recorded from phone-in programs and forums on the radio in Hong Kong. The database represents the speech of a total of sixty-nine speakers in addition to the program hosts, and has approximately 170,000 characters. It is believed that HKCAC will be of great value to linguists who are interested in studying Cantonese, and speech therapists and educators who work with the Cantonese speaking population. A search engine with a user-friendly interface has also been developed by using FileMaker Pro 4.0 (Chinese version). Apart from the basic frequency information and the display of search results in KWAL (Key Word And Line) format, the search engine also allows users to search for various phonetic realizations of a particular character or the set of characters associated with a particular syllable. The content and structure of the corpus, and the overall architecture as well as the technical aspects of the search engine are described. Search procedures are illustrated with examples. The paper ends with a discussion of the future development of HKCAC.
A corpus-based study of connectors in student writing
Authors: Bolton Kingsley , Nelson Gerald , Hung Joseph
Published: September 2007

This paper focuses on connector usage in the writing of university students in Hong Kong and in Great Britain, and presents results based on the comparison of data from the Hong Kong component (ICE-HK) and the British component (ICE-GB) of the International Corpus of English (ICE). While previous studies of Hong Kong student writing have dealt with the ‘underuse’, ‘overuse’, and ‘misuse’ of connectors, this study confines itself to the analysis of underuse and overuse, and is especially concerned with methodological issues relating to the accurate measurement of these concepts. Specifically, it takes as its benchmark of overuse and underuse the frequency of connectors in professional academic writing, in this case the data in the ICE-GB corpus. The results show that measured in this way, both groups of students – native speakers and non-native speakers alike – overuse a wide range of connectors. The results offer no evidence of significant underuse.
Automatic retrieval of syntactic structures
Authors: Gilquin Gaëtanelle
Published: September 2007

The study of complex grammatical patterns tends to be neglected by corpus linguists, the main reason being that such phenomena are much more difficult to extract from a corpus than simple words or tags. I demonstrate in this article that, although the desirable parsed corpora and appropriate software are not always available, the retrieval of syntactic structures can be automated to a certain extent. A number of corpus-based grammatical analyses, as well as a pilot study of causative structures with make, illustrate the various alternative strategies that can be used to this effect.
A multifactorial corpus analysis of adjective order in English
Authors: Wulff Stefanie
Published: September 2007

This paper is concerned with the question of which factors govern prenominal adjective order (AO) in English. In particular, the analysis aims to overcome shortfalls of previous analyses by, firstly, adopting a multifactorial approach integrating all variables postulated in the literature, thereby doing justice to the well-established fact that cognitive and psychological processes are multivariate and complex. Secondly, the phenomenon is investigated on the basis of a large corpus, rendering the results obtained more representative and valid of naturally occurring language than those of previous studies. To this end, corpus-linguistic operationalizations of phonological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic determinants of AO are devised and entered into a Linear Discriminant Analysis, which determines the relative influence of all variables (semantic variables being most important) and yields a classification accuracy of 78%. Moreover, by means of the operationalizations developed in this analysis, the ordering of yet unanalyzed adjective strings can be predicted with about equal accuracy (73.5%).
Modality in Czech and English
Authors: Čermák František , Klégr Aleš
Published: September 2007

The paper examines two kinds of modality exponents and their interlingual relationships, using an aligned parallel minicorpus of two contemporary Czech originals (drama and novel) and their English translations. It focuses on four most frequent Czech adverbial particles of possibility/approximation:snad, mozná, asi, nejspíe,and the Czech conditional mood marker by in the texts and their equivalents. It contrasts the findings with the equivalents in the latest and largest Czech-English dictionary. The results confirm that in either case the lexicographic description is insufficient both in the range of equivalents offered and their respective representativeness.
"Utterly content in each other's company"
Authors: Partington Alan
Published: September 2007

In this paper I wish to examine the two related concepts of semantic prosody and semantic preference. I will begin the section on each with a definition, attempt a review of relevant current positions and then describe a number of corpus-based experiments I conducted to throw light on the two phenomena. Finally, I will try to draw some conclusions about the relationship between them.
The automatic recognition of verb patterns
Authors: Mason Oliver , Hunston Susan
Published: September 2007

Patterns describe the syntactic behaviour of lexical items by specifying their local environment. This paper reports on a pilot study to automatically recognise those patterns in text. This study has been successful in producing a system that identifies patterns using only limited linguistic knowledge. It also has raised several issues which will have to be dealt with in future work.
Concordancing oneself
Authors: Coniam David
Published: September 2007

This paper discusses the construction and analysis of a corpus of an individual's own academic writing. Following an examination of the area of academic writing and the position of academic writing corpora within it, the paper discusses how a ‘personal corpus’ might be put together, along with issues of the necessary quality and quantity of ‘text’, and problems which may arise in the construction of a personal corpus. The paper also proposes a background, general ‘reference’ corpus against which features of academic writing may be measured, whilst admitting that accessibility to, or production of, such a potentially large corpus will generally be beyond the means of many researchers interested in small-scale analyses. Using concordancers, some limited analyses of lexical, syntactic and discourse features are then presented to show how a potential personal profile might emerge. The paper concludes with a discussion of the limitations facing the analysis of one's own writing, but suggests that, despite limitations, worthwhile insights can be gained in respect of one's personal language awareness.
Gravity Counts for the boundaries of collocations
Authors: Daudaravičius Vidas , Petrauskaitė Rūta
Published: September 2007

This paper compares several methods (MI,T-score, Dice) for the extraction of collocations and presents a new method called Gravity Counts. The respective methods are evaluated and compared, measuring the combinability and collocability for each pair of words within the moving span of three words in the corpus of “The Times” newspaper for the year 1995. The collocability of words is the basis for detection of the collocational chains, i.e. frequent recurrent uninterrupted strings of word-forms, with clear-cut boundaries, found in the corpus. Collocational chains obtained with the help of different methods are compared and their lexical, grammatical and semantic features discussed.
Dominance style, differences between the sexes and individuals
Authors: Hemelrijk Charlotte K. , Gygax Lorenz
Published: September 2007

In recent studies of primates, the question has been raised whether competitive regimes (egalitarian versus despotic) are species-specific or should rather be considered as sex-specific. To study this problem we use an individual-oriented model called DomWorld in which artificial agents are equipped merely to group and compete. In former studies of this model, dominance style appeared to be strongly influenced by the intensity of aggression: by increasing only this intensity of aggression, a great number of the characteristics of an egalitarian society switched to those of a despotic one. Here, we investigate, using DomWorld, a competitive regime of artificial males and females that differ exclusively in their fighting capacity; males having a higher intensity of aggression and a higher initial capacity of winning, such as may be due to a male-biased sexual dimorphism. Unexpectedly it appears that, in the model, even if the intensity of aggression of males is greater than that of females, their hierarchy is still significantly weaker and thus their society less differentiated and more egalitarian than that of females. The explanation is that, due to the higher initial dominance of males (compare larger body size), single events of victory and defeat lead to less differentiation than among females. The greater the sexual difference in initial dominance between the sexes is the more egalitarian the males behave among themselves compared to the behaviour of the females among themselves. These effects are already visible during the initial phases of the hierarchical development. These results resemble findings among primates; in real primates their degree of sexual dimorphism may influence the competitive regime of each sex.
Manual deixis in apes and humans
Authors: Leavens David A.
Published: September 2007

Pointing by apes is near-ubiquitous in captivity, yet rare in their natural habitats. This has implications for understanding both the ontogeny and heritability of pointing, conceived as a behavioral phenotype. The data suggest that the cognitive capacity for manual deixis was possessed by the last common ancestor of humans and the great apes. In this review, nonverbal reference is distinguished from symbolic reference. An operational definition of intentional communication is delineated, citing published or forthcoming examples for each of the defining criteria from studies of manual gestures in apes. Claims that chimpanzees do not point amongst themselves or do not gesture declaratively are refuted with published examples. Links between pointing and cognitive milestones in other domains relating means to ends are discussed. Finally, an evolutionary scenario of pointing as an adaptation to changes in hominid development is briefly sketched.
How minds and selves are made
Authors: Kusch Martin
Published: September 2007

This paper aims at a conceptual clarification of some of the mechanisms that are involved when human selves are made in interactions with each other. Four such broad mechanisms are distinguished: socialisation, classification of self and others, the deference-emotion system, and the attribution and manipulation of the status of the responsible agent. The first two mechanisms are modelled with simple mechanical machines like clocks and signalling devices. Regarding the status of the responsible agent, the paper offers a proposal as to why we have conflicting intuitions about freedom of the will.
The self and identity negotiation
Authors: Swann William B.
Published: September 2007

Identity negotiation refers to the processes through which perceivers and targets come to agreements regarding the identities that targets are to assume in the interaction. Whereas past work has focused on the contribution of perceivers to the identity negotiation process, I emphasize the contribution of targets to this process. Specifically, I examine the tendency for targets to work to bring perceivers to verify their self-views. For example, people prefer and seek self-verifying evaluations from others, including their spouses and employers — even when this means attaining evaluations that validate negative self-views. Moreover, receiving self-verification has adaptive consequences, even improving the performance of workers in diverse groups. Some boundary conditions of self-verification strivings as well as implications for making of minds are discussed.
Social reality makes the social mind
Authors: Jussim Lee , Harber Kent D. , Crawford Jarret T. , Cain Thomas R. , Cohen Florette
Published: September 2007

This paper contests social psychology’s emphasis on the biased, erroneous, and constructed nature of social cognition by: (1) showing how the extent of bias and error in classic research is overstated; (2) summarizing research regarding the accuracy of social beliefs; and (3) describing how social stereotypes sometimes improve person perception accuracy. A Goodness of Judgment Index is also presented to extract evidence regarding accuracy from research focusing on bias. We conclude that accuracy is necessary for understanding social cognition.
Building a talking baby robot
Authors: Serkhane Jihène , Schwartz Jean-Luc , Bessière Pierre
Published: September 2007

Speech is a perceptuo-motor system. A natural computational modeling framework is provided by cognitive robotics, or more precisely speech robotics, which is also based on embodiment, multimodality, development, and interaction. This paper describes the bases of a virtual baby robot which consists in an articulatory model that integrates the non-uniform growth of the vocal tract, a set of sensors, and a learning model. The articulatory model delivers sagittal contour, lip shape and acoustic formants from seven input parameters that characterize the configurations of the jaw, the tongue, the lips and the larynx. To simulate the growth of the vocal tract from birth to adulthood, a process modifies the longitudinal dimension of the vocal tract shape as a function of age. The auditory system of the robot comprises a “phasic” system for event detection over time, and a “tonic” system to track formants. The model of visual perception specifies the basic lips characteristics: height, width, area and protrusion. The orosensorial channel, which provides the tactile sensation on the lips, the tongue and the palate, is elaborated as a model for the prediction of tongue-palatal contacts from articulatory commands. Learning involves Bayesian programming, in which there are two phases: (i) specification of the variables, decomposition of the joint distribution and identification of the free parameters through exploration of a learning set, and (ii) utilization which relies on questions about the joint distribution.

Two studies were performed with this system. Each of them focused on one of the two basic mechanisms, which ought to be at work in the initial periods of speech acquisition, namely vocal exploration and vocal imitation. The first study attempted to assess infants’ motor skills before and at the beginning of canonical babbling. It used the model to infer the acoustic regions, the articulatory degrees of freedom and the vocal tract shapes that are the likeliest explored by actual infants according to their vocalizations. Subsequently, the aim was to simulate data reported in the literature on early vocal imitation, in order to test whether and how the robot was able to reproduce them and to gain some insights into the actual cognitive representations that might be involved in this behavior.

Speech modeling in a robotics framework should contribute to a computational approach of sensori-motor interactions in speech communication, which seems crucial for future progress in the study of speech and language ontogeny and phylogeny.
Aspects of descriptive, referential, and information structure in phrasal semantics
Authors: Dominey Peter F.
Published: September 2007

Phrasal semantics is concerned with how the meaning of a sentence is composed both from the meaning of the constituent words, and from extra meaning contained within the structural organization of the sentence itself. In this context, grammatical constructions correspond to form-meaning mappings that essentially capture this “extra” meaning and allow its representation. The current research examines how a computational model of language processing based on a construction grammar approach can account for aspects of descriptive, referential and information content of phrasal semantics.
Ostracism
Authors: Williams Kipling D. , Gerber Jonathan
Published: September 2007

This chapter explores the powerful consequences of ostracism — being ignored and excluded — at the neurophysiological, emotional, cognitive and behavioral levels. Once ostracized, individuals first recoil in pain, then perceive and respond to their social environments differently, leading them to interpret and attend to particular information that may help them cope, or often, that may perpetuate their state of exclusion. We will discuss the nature and antecedents of adaptive and maladaptive reactions to ostracism. Finally, we will report several experiments aimed at explicating the links between ostracism and pro-social or anti-social behavior.
Self processes in interdependent relationships
Authors: Rusbult Caryl E. , Kumashiro Madoka , Stocker Shevaun L. , Kirchner Jeffrey L. , Finkel Eli J. , Coolsen Michael K.
Published: September 2007

This essay reviews theory and research regarding the “Michelangelo phenomenon,” which describes the manner in which close partners shape one another’s dispositions, values, and behavioral tendencies. Individuals are more likely to exhibit movement toward their ideal selves to the degree that their partners exhibit affirming perception and behavior; exhibiting confidence in the self’s capacity and enacting behaviors that elicit key features of the self’s ideal. In turn, movement towards the ideal self yields enhanced personal well-being and couple well-being. We review empirical evidence regarding this phenomenon and discuss self and partner variables that contribute to the process.
Chimpanzees are sensitive to some of the psychological states of others
Authors: Call Josep
Published: September 2007

Animals react and adjust to the behavior of their conspecifics. Much less is known about whether animals also react and adjust to the psychological states of others. Recent evidence suggests that chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) follow the gaze of others around barriers, past distracters, and check back if they find nothing. Chimpanzees can gauge the motives of a human experimenter and distinguish his intentional from accidental actions. These results suggest that chimpanzees interpret the perceptions and actions of others from a psychological perspective -they seem to know what others can and cannot see and what goals others pursue. It is hypothesized that the co-operation of (1) the ability to operate on psychological states and (2) the motivation to share emotions and experiences with others are key ingredients in the making of human minds.
Adaptive value within natural language discourse
Authors: Best Michael L.
Published: September 2007

A trait is of adaptive value if it confers a fitness advantage to its possessor. Thus adaptiveness is an ahistorical identification of a trait affording some selective advantage to an agent within some particular environment. In results reported here we identify a trait within natural language discourse as having adaptive value by computing a trait/fitness covariance; the possession of the trait correlates with the replication success of the trait’s possessor. We show that the trait covaries with fitness across multiple unrelated discursive groups. In our analysis the trait in question is a particular statistically derived word-in-context, that is, a word set. Variation of the word-usage is measured as the relative presence of the word set within a particular text, that is, the percentage of the text devoted to this set of words. Fitness is measured as the rate in which the text is responded to, or replicates, within an online environment. Thus we are studying the micro-evolutionary dynamics of natural language discourse.
Reinforcing robot perception of multi-modal events through repetition and redundancy and repetition and redundancy
Authors: Fitzpatrick Paul , Arsenio Artur , Torres-Jara Eduardo R.
Published: September 2007

For a robot to be capable of development it must be able to explore its environment and learn from its experiences. It must find (or create) opportunities to experience the unfamiliar in ways that reveal properties valid beyond the immediate context. In this paper, we develop a novel method for using the rhythm of everyday actions as a basis for identifying the characteristic appearance and sounds associated with objects, people, and the robot itself. Our approach is to identify and segment groups of signals in individual modalities (sight, hearing, and proprioception) based on their rhythmic variation, then to identify and bind causally-related groups of signals across different modalities. By including proprioception as a modality, this cross-modal binding method applies to the robot itself, and we report a series of experiments in which the robot learns about the characteristics of its own body.
An approach for a social robot to understand human relationships
Authors: Kanda Takayuki , Ishiguro Hiroshi
Published: September 2007

This paper reports our research efforts on social robots that recognize interpersonal relationships. These investigations are carried out by observing group behaviors while the robot interacts with people. Our humanoid robot interacts with children by speaking and making various gestures. It identifies individual children by using a wireless tag system, which helps to promote interaction such as the robot calling a child by name. Accordingly, the robot is capable of interacting with many children, causing spontaneous group behavior from the children around it. Here, group behavior is associated with social relationships among the children themselves. For example, a child may be accompanied by his or her friends and then play together with them. We propose the hypothesis that our interactive robot prompts a child’s friends to accompany him or her; thus, we can estimate their friendship by simply observing their accompanying behaviors.

We conducted a field experiment for two weeks in a Japanese elementary school to verify this hypothesis. In the experiment, two “Robovie” robots were placed where children could freely interact with them during recesses. As a result, we found that they mostly prompted friend-accompanying behavior. Moreover, we could estimate some of their friendly relationships, in particular among the children who often appeared around the robot. For example, we could estimate 5% of all friendships with 80% accuracy, and 15% of them with nearly 50% accuracy. Thus, this result basically supports our hypothesis on friendship estimation from an interactive humanoid robot. We believe that this ability to estimate human relationships is essential for robots to behave socially.
To help or not to help a service robot
Authors: Hüttenrauch Helge , Severinson-Eklundh Kerstin
Published: September 2007

A mobile service robot performing a task for its user(s) might not be able to accomplish its mission without help from other people present in the shared environment. In previous research, collaborative control has been studied as an interactive mode of operation with a robot, compensating for its limitations in autonomy. However, few studies of robots requesting assistance by detecting potential collaborators, directing its attention to them, addressing them, and finally obtaining help from them, have previously been performed in real-world use contexts. This study focuses on a fetch-and-carry robot, Cero, which has been designed to operate in an office environment as an aid for motion-impaired users. During its missions, the robot sometimes needs help with loading or unloading an object. The main question for the study was: under what conditions are people willing to help when requested to do so by the robot? We were particularly interested in bystanders, i.e. people who happened to be in the environment but who did not “have any official business” with the robot (they neither knew anything about the robot, nor did they have access rights to the robot or its functions). To answer these questions and to provide a better understanding of human–robot help-seeking situations, we conducted an experimental study in which subjects who had not encountered our service robot before were requested to assist it with a task. The results of the study confirm that bystanders can to some degree be expected to help in robot missions, but that their willingness to help the robot depends on the situation and state of occupation that people are in when requested to interact with and assist the robot.
The Effect of VCR on Major Media Markets in Korea, 1961–1993
Authors: Kim Sung Tae
Published: September 2007

By applying the Principle of Relative Constancy, this article extends prior research about consumer expenditures on mass media. To analyze four major mass media markets in Korea, including newspaper, movie, television, and VCR, this study employs two complementary methods: a regression analysis to test the Relative Constancy Hypothesis and market scale and elasticity analyses to measure the level of fluctuation of media markets during selected time periods.
Influence of Corporate Image and Country of Origin Image on South Korean Attitudes towards and Beliefs about Foreign Subsidiaries
Authors: Oh Mi-Young , Ramaprasad Jyotika
Published: September 2007

This study examined the South Korean public’s image of the multinational corporations (MNCs) Coca-Cola and Sony and their countries of origin (the U.S. and Japan) as well as the attitude toward and beliefs about the South Korean subsidiaries of these companies. The study also investigated the relationship between MNC and country images, on the one hand, and attitudes and beliefs about the subsidiaries, on the other.This study examined the South Korean public’s image of the multinational corporations (MNCs) Coca-Cola and Sony and their countries of origin (the U.S. and Japan) as well as the attitude toward and beliefs about the South Korean subsidiaries of these companies. The study also investigated the relationship between MNC and country images, on the one hand, and attitudes and beliefs about the subsidiaries, on the other.

The study found that, in general, images of Coca-Cola and Sony as corporations as well as of the U.S. and Japan as countries of origin of these MNCs, among a convenience sample of residents of Seoul, were somewhat more positive than negative across various dimensions. However, their attitudes towards foreign subsidiaries of these MNCs — Coca-Cola, South Korea and Sony, South Korea — were somewhat negative. In addition, the MNCs’ corporate image and country of origin image significantly predicted attitude towards and beliefs about the South Korean subsidiaries of these MNCs. MNCs and their subsidiaries need to pay particular attention to their business and social conduct in terms of good citizenship and responsible behavior towards the community.
Hemisphere lateralization differences
Authors: Hiser Elizabeth , Kobayashi Junko
Published: September 2007

This paper reports on a cross-cultural study comparing the lateralization preferences between Japanese and American university students in Japan. The cross-cultural literature points to stereotypical descriptors which are similar to lateralization descriptors which provide significant differences in content when investigated by survey among the two ethnic groups. Cultural descriptors for the two groups are defined and the issue of preference for statistical- vs. feeling-oriented support for controversial local issues is linked theoretically to the left vs. right hemisphere preferences, but proves of limited validity for the study. Final results for the Japanese sub-sample for lateralization preference (64%) show a tendency for right-hemisphere processing preference over an American left-hemisphere preference (65%) in the same area.
Communication networks of Japanese language learners in their home country
Authors: Kurata Naomi
Published: September 2007

This paper deals with communication networks of four upper-intermediate level Japanese language learners with in-country experience who are studying at an Australian university, and it also examines the relationship between the learners’ networks and language learning. Utilizing Boissevain’s criteria for network analysis, I compared the characteristics of the informants’ current networks with those that existed prior to their in-country experiences. In addition, this study applied the framework of communicative competence developed by Hymes and Neustupny to analyse the informants’ language learning that occurred within their networks.

The study found that a number of characteristics of the informants’ networks, such as their multiplex social roles and the variety of backgrounds of their Japanese network interactants, were probably related to the raising of the learners’ non-linguistic as well as linguistic awareness. It therefore appears that learners’ out-of-class communication networks with native speakers of the target language play an important role in terms of language learning.
The tangled web
Authors: Sutherland-Smith Wendy
Published: September 2007

This study explores the notion of plagiarism and the Internet from 11 English as Second Language (ESL) teachers and 186 first-year ESL students at South-Coast University in Melbourne, Australia. Data collection was by a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews, and coded using SPSS and N*Vivo software to ascertain trends in response. The most significant difference in response related to the concept of the Internet as copyrightable space. ESL teachers in this study regarded cyberspace as a limitless environment for ‘cut and paste’ plagiarism in students’ academic writing, whereas ESL students considered the Internet a ‘free zone’ and not governed by legal proprietary rights. These conflicting views, it is suggested, relate to differing notions of authorship and attribution: the Romantic notion protected by legal theory and sanctions versus literary theory and techno-literacy notions of authorship. This research highlights the need to reformulate plagiarism policies in light of global and technological perspectives of authorship and attribution of text.
Marwari business discourse
Authors: Dhanania Kusum , Gopakumaran Sandhya
Published: September 2007

The aim of this article is to analyse the patterns of the business discourse of the Marwari community, one of the most successful business communities in India. Two specific business contexts — of the dispute situation and non-dispute situation — have been examined across the pre-colonial, the colonial and post-colonial period to gauge the Marwari responses to social, cultural and political changes in the history of India. The Marwari culture is synonymous with their business ethos. Migration, religion and family are factors that contribute to their distinct identity as a business community. Various observations made by business historians about the community have been examined through the lenses of communication and discourse to highlight the distinguishing features of the Marwari business ethos. The second part of the article examines the Marwari dispute resolution method as the secret behind the success of the Marwaris as a business community, when compared to the adversarial method of dispute resolution adopted by disputing parties at large in India. The concluding part of the paper recognizes certain ambivalences in the context of a confluence between the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial methods of dispute resolutions in Marwari dispute resolution contexts in the globalization era in India.
An interactional model of English in Malaysia
Authors: Nair-Venugopal Shanta
Published: September 2007

This article argues for an interactional model of English as contextualised language use for localised business purposes. Two observations on the ground provided the impetus for the argument. One, that business communication skills training in English in Malaysia is invariably based on the prescribed usage of commercially produced materials. Two, that communication skills training in English is a lucrative model-dependent industry that supports the logic of the triumphalism of specific models of English as an international or global language (Smith 1983; Crystal 1997), or as the language of international capitalism. Yet a functional model of interaction operates actual workplace settings in Malaysia. Such evidence counters marketing mythologies of purportedly universal forms of language use in business contexts worldwide. It exposes the dichotomy that exists between the prescribed patterns of English usage such as those found in the plethora of commercially produced materials, and those of contextualised language use, as business discourse in real-time workplace interactions. Not least of all, it provides support for an indigenous model as an appropriate response to a pervasive global ideology at work. To ignore this phenomenon is to deny the pragmatic relevance of speaking English as one of the languages of localised business which is just as vital for national economies as the big business of international capitalism.
Accounts as a politeness strategy in the internal directive documents of a business firm in Hong Kong
Authors: Kong Kenneth C.C.
Published: September 2007

In this paper, the frequency, semantic type and sequencing of accounts in internal company emails with directive elements are examined. It is found that subordinates justify most frequently when they make requests to their superiors, while managers tend to justify their requests to their subordinates more frequently than peers justify requests among themselves. The latter finding is attributed to the dilemma that is faced by modern institutions of controlling workers to accomplish institutional goals on the one hand, and allowing individuals to work as autonomous workers on the other hand. Nevertheless, managers, when requesting their subordinates, tend to use more accounts that are not typically associated with justification for action or accounts that are in line with the ideology of control and regulation. The sequencing of accounts is argued to be the result of a number of factors, including coherence, agent reference and the relationship between addressor and addressee.
Persuasive and politeness strategies in cross-cultural letters of request in the Thai business context
Authors: Chakorn Ora-Ong
Published: September 2007

This article sheds light on the rhetoric of cross-cultural letters of request in the Thai business context. The focus is on the contrastive analysis of 80 authentic letters of request written in English by Thai speakers and native English speakers. The corpus consists of 38 Thai (TH) letters, and 42 Non-Thai (NT) letters. The cross-cultural variation is investigated both quantitatively and qualitatively from the perspectives of contrastive text linguistics and pragmatic. The quantitative analysis explores the lengths of the TH and NT letters in relation to the distribution and position of requests. Contrastive text linguistics was used in this study to examine the rhetorical structures (e.g. structural representation) in letters of request and their linguistic realisations (e.g. linguistic features). From a pragmatic perspective, the analytical focus was on persuasive strategies (i.e. rhetorical appeals — logos, ethos, pathos), and politeness strategies, some of which are culture-bound.

The overall investigation manifests the diversity in language use which distinguishes Thai-style business requests from western-style ones. What Hinds (1990) calls a quasi-inductive style of writing or delayed introduction of purpose is a unique hedging strategy found exclusively in the TH letters. The NT requests tend to be more direct, often involving a ‘baldly on record’ strategy. In contrast in a similarly formal context, the TH request letters typically use more negative politeness in that they include more indirect, deferential and self-effacing strategies. According to the Aristotelian concept of persuasive rhetoric, the TH letters generally use a combination of logos, ethos and pathos whereas the NT letters tend to predominantly use a strong logos. These three rhetorical appeals can be regarded as persuasive strategies; the findings reveal some culture-specific differences in the persuasive strategies used in TH and NT letters of request.
Theorizing language contact, spread, and variation in status planning
Authors: Zhou Minglang
Published: September 2007

A theoretical model, managed community second language acquisition (SLA), is proposed to provide a comprehensive view of nine studies of language contact, spread, variation, and attitudes of Chinese, which are shaped by nearly a century of language planning. The model has been reformulated on the basis of the individual SLA modle and it is intended to make the notions of macroacquisition and planning acquisition operational. It has two linguistic factors (input and output) and two sociolinguistic factors (language identity and language marketability) that can be managed or manipulated in status planning. The two sociolinguistic factors, language identity and marketability, appear to have played the most significant roles in language spread, variation, and attitudes in status planning, at least in China. This model also serves as the basis to make a theoretical distinction between interference and borrowing, a distinction that helps to sort out the consequences of language contact and provides indexes of language shift under status planning conditions.
Hypercorrection in Taiwan Mandarin
Authors: Steffen Chung Karen
Published: September 2007

In spite of a widening acceptance of attenuated retroflexed initials (zh‑, ch‑ sh‑) in Taiwan Mandarin today, there is a parallel movement in seemingly the opposite direction: a growing use of the retroflexed initials in certain contexts. A conflict between the two trends often surfaces in the form of hypercorrection, that is, incorrect substitution of the retroflexed initials for the corresponding dental initials (z‑, c‑, s‑). Labov (1973) observed a trend toward a similar kind of phonetic hypercorrection in New York City English, mainly among the upwardly-aspiring lower middle class. Though this group is also especially susceptible to the use of hypercorrect forms in Taiwan, people in all walks of life with all levels of education have been observed to use hypercorrect forms. This demonstrates, first, that the textbook forms of the retroflexed vs. dental initials are learned imperfectly by a wide spectrum of speakers of Taiwan Mandarin; second, that the retroflexed initials retain a certain cachet in marking speech as more prestigious and authoritative; and third, that retroflexion, hypercorrect or otherwise, has for many people taken on the function of simply marking formal discourse, in addition to its use for disambiguation, highlighting, and stylistic effect.
Urban migration and functional bilingualism in Guangdong Province, China
Authors: Miao Ruiqin , Li Jiaxuan
Published: September 2007

Massive population movement across dialectal boundaries in contemporary China leads to increasing bilingualism in Putonghua (Standard Chinese) and regional dialects. This study investigates the functional distribution of Putonghua and Cantonese as spoken by immigrant residents in Guangdong Province. Results from questionnaire surveys in Guangzhou and Shenzhen reveal different patterns of Putonghua-dialect bilingualism in the two cities. For immigrants in Guangzhou, Putonghua and the local dialect (Cantonese) have comparable strength and functions, whereas in Shenzhen, Putonghua serves as the dominant language. To account for the differences between Guangzhou and Shenzhen, we argue that demographic structure is an important factor regulating the standard-dialect relationship in the urban communities of China. We propose that social network features correlate with the respective instrumental and integrative values of the languages or dialects in contact. This research provides insights into the dynamic interaction between the standard language and dialects in multilingual societies that are experiencing profound social changes.
Language choices and industrialization
Authors: Yang Jinyi
Published: September 2007

To understand language choice and development in the process of industrialization it is essential to study how the children of workers (the second generation) in a rising industrial community choose their language/dialect for daily communication. The coexistence of three speech communities: dialect, dialect-and-Putonghua mixed, and Putonghua, in three urban districts of Luoyang City, Henan Province, since the 1950s is representative of language development during China’s industrialization. Based on a large-scale survey, this article compares language and dialect use in these three urban districts and some special danwei (work-unit) language islands in Luoyang. This study shows why and how the second generation in a rising industrial community have chosen or not chosen Putonghua as their major language for daily communication. It concludes with a discussion on the characters and underlining principles of language choice in the course of industrialization under the planned economy in China.
Some observations on dialectal lexis interference in Putonghua
Authors: He Yuanjian
Published: September 2007

How dialectal lexis may interfere with Putonghua spoken in a region has long been talked about but has rarely received much attention in scholarly literature. The issue is often complicated by the fact that there is a lack of a set of commonly recognized criteria with which to define regional Putonghua varieties vis-à-vis the regional dialects. Against this background, I have in this paper first argued for taking Putonghua education and use at, after and beyond school as the bench mark for defining regional Putonghua varieties either as true linguistic entities or as conceptual entities. Then, I have examined how question words and interrogative particles in the Chengdu dialect find their way into the Putonghua spoken in that region, attributing the lexical interference to two main factors. The first is the salient linguistic connection between Putonghua and the Chengdu dialect, which is a major southwestern branch of Mandarin, and the second is more sociolinguistically related, being associated with the speaker’s education and need for using Putonghua at work against a rapidly developing regional economy.
The Rg Vedic hymn as a ritual speech event
Authors: Ilieva Gabriela Nik.
Published: September 2007

In the present work I try to show how certain distinctive grammatical-rhetorical features of the hymns, such as frequent use of elaborate epithets, a rich arsenal of noun and pronoun address forms as well as a large variety of finite verb forms, can be accounted for from a pragmatic perspective by discussing them at the three main linguistic levels — morphology, lexicon, syntax. 10.39 is a representative laudatory hymn performed in a ceremonial setting, whose topic is related to the desire of a female speaker to find a good husband. The analysis is based on a socially and psychologically oriented application of pragmatic principles, namely, the politeness framework and it takes into account the specific context, on which the pragmatic interpretations are strictly dependent. The hymn is discussed as a communicative event, possible through the use of the Vedic language and designed to achieve specific ritualistic goals.
A critique of Levinson’s view of Q- and M-inferences in historical pragmatics
Authors: Traugott Elizabeth Closs
Published: September 2007

In Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Conversational Implicature, Levinson (2000) argues that in historical as well as synchronic work there is need to distinguish three types of pragmatic principles, which he labels the Q-, M-, and I- “heuristics”. This is in contrast to Horn (1984), who argues for two types of “principles”: Q- and R-. In the present paper I argue that the proposed distinction between Q- and M- Heuristics is not necessary or consistently maintainable. Two of Levinson’s examples are considered: the development of anaphora (reflexive -self in English), and constraints on innovations in word formation (e.g. informer/informant). The conclusion is that a single heuristic (Q) is adequate, as proposed by Horn.
Historical patterns for the grammatical marking of stance
Authors: Biber Douglas
Published: September 2007

English has a rich supply of grammatical devices used to express “stance”: epistemic or attitudinal comments on propositional information. The present paper explores historical change in the preferred devices used to mark stance. By examining the entire system of stance devices, the study attempts to investigate the underlying patterns of change. Three major patterns are possible: 1) changes in social norms could result in speakers and writers expressing stance meanings to differing extents in different periods; 2) the grammatical system for the expression of stance could undergo change, showing an overall decline in the use of some grammatical devices, replaced by an increase in the use of other devices; 3) the patterns of use could undergo sharper register diversification over time, with particular stance devices taking on more specialized uses in particular registers. These possibilities are explored through corpus-based analysis of the written and speech-based registers in the ARCHER corpus, tracking the patterns of change across the past three centuries.