bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The subjunctive vs. modal auxiliaries
Authors: Kikusawa Namiko
Published: March 2014

The aim of this paper is to provide a detailed analysis of lest-clauses in Late Middle English (LME) prose texts, using a corpus-based approach. In lest-clauses, there are two options for the verb forms: the subjunctive or modal auxiliaries (e.g. He wrote the telephone number down lest he forget/should forget it). This paper focuses on the distribution of the subjunctive and modal auxiliaries and discusses the factors that affect their distributional tendencies: type of clauses (adverbial/complement), genre of texts (religious, fiction, letters, etc.) and the difference between written and spoken materials.
Interjections in Middle English
Authors: Sauer Hans
Published: March 2014

In “The Reeve’s Tale” (ReevT) from his Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1345–1400) uses 27–41 different interjections (depending on how one counts). In the present article these are described, analyzed and interpreted. Moreover, I look into the extent to which they are typical of Middle English (ME) interjections in general or of Chaucer and his ReevT in particular. A brief preliminary discussion of the term “interjection“ (or “exclamation”) is given in Section 1, a short review of research on ME interjections in Section 2, and a thumbnail sketch of ReevT in Section 3. The interjections that occur in ReevT are listed in Section 4, where some problematic cases are also discussed. After that, details of their use and origin are described. Section 5 looks at how Chaucer uses interjections to characterize his figures, Section 6 at phonologic and morphologic aspects (e.g. the distinction between primary and secondary interjections), Section 7 at their position in the sentence (initial, medial, final, consecutively, or variable), and Section 8 at semantic and pragmatic aspects, i.e. their use as expressions of emotion, but also as greeting and farewell formulae, as attention and response getters (including cries for help), as response forms, as emphasizers and corroboratives (merging into swear words), etc. Section 9 discusses their etymology and distinguishes between native and borrowed interjections. Section 10 investigates the frequency of the interjections in ReevT and compares it with their general frequency in ME. The numbers for the general frequency are based on the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse (CMEPV), which is available on the internet. The range is from very frequent interjections such as lo/loo, which is attested almost 5,000 times, and alas/allas (ca. 3,800 times), to interjections of medium frequency, for example harrow with ca. 55 attestations, and to some seven hapax legomena, such as by Goddes herte, for Cristes peyne, and jossa. It is difficult to tell whether the latter were coined by Chaucer or more commonly used but not otherwise attested due to the vagaries of transmission and the nature of the texts that were normally committed to writing and did not favour emphasizers and swear words. To complete the picture, Section 11 lists other interjections that Chaucer uses elsewhere, but not in ReevT.
Why and what in Early Modern English drama
Authors: Lutzky Ursula
Published: March 2014

This study sheds new light on the nature of the discourse markers why and what in the Early Modern English (EModE) period. It attempts to fill a gap by providing a contrastive analysis of these two markers of similar origin in the drama samples of two EModE corpora – A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 and the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English – covering the time span 1500 to 1760. The discourse markers are approached from a quantitative and a qualitative perspective, so as to account for their frequency of attestation as well as their functions, with the aim of reaching a deeper understanding of the potential similarities and differences in their use and development in the course of the EModE period.
... ging uns der ganze alte Dialektbegriff in eine Illusion auf
Authors: Mair Christian
Published: March 2014

Referring to the work of the Innsbruck-born and Berlin-based dialectologist Alois Brandl (1855–1940), the paper shows how the opportunities provided by early recording technology made linguists question the notion of dialect as a stable, regionally defined variety of a language. It goes on to argue that since then rapid migration and the new media, with their interactive potential, have joined to further sever the link between territory and dialect and have, in many instances, led to an almost instant globalization of vernacular features which is not yet adequately captured by our existing variationist models. Examples are taken from English-based pidgins and creoles, which were geographically and socially marginal languages in the colonial period, but have gained considerable visibility world-wide in the last few decades. The paper concludes by making the point that globalization does not merely affect the spread and influence of standard varieties of English but that there is today also a large pool of deterritorialized dialect features which make it useful to postulate the existence of a “World Non-Standard English” (WNSE).
Explicit and tacit
Authors: Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk Barbara
Published: March 2014

The aim of the present chapter is to evaluate the extent to which quantitative and qualitative methodologies used in translation studies interplay and what new insights are obtained as a consequence of investigating explicit corpus-based data with a more tacit semantic enquiry. The approach used is Cognitive Corpus-based Linguistic methodology as applied to contrastive and to corpus-based translation studies. What is presented and interpreted is a comparison between the frequency of use of lexical units, phrases (collocations) and sentence segments in the English-to-Polish or Polish-to-English original and translated texts, juxtaposed to those identified in respective mono-lingual corpora. The paper provides evidence that, combined with a comparison of keyness and collocation patterns as well as lexical equivalence patterns and metaphor inquiry (exemplified with a number of emotion words in translation), all these parameters give us a clue to language-specific imagery construal and reconceptualization processes in translation.
Hypothesis testing in corpus-based literary translation studies
Authors: Ji Meng
Published: March 2014

The main purpose of this chapter is to develop useful analytical frameworks for translation studies. The new analytical frameworks proposed will integrate quantitative and qualitative analysis of textual and contextual events and phenomena of translation. Three sets of relationship are highlighted to illustrate the usefulness of these new analytical schemes which are (1) the dependence relation between the source and the target text at various linguistic levels such as lexical, syntactic, grammatical and phraseological; (2) the dependence relation between translation and the target societal and cultural background; and (3) the dependence relation between the language of individual translations and the linguistic evolution of the target language at a general level. To illustrate the use of the new model of quantitative and qualitative analysis, this chapter offers a case study which compares the stylistic profile of Cervantes’s Don Quijote de La Mancha (1605) and its two modern Chinese versions by Yang Jiang in 1978 and by Liu Jingsheng in 1995.
Lexical lectometry in corpus-based translation studies
Authors: De Sutter Gert , Delaere Isabelle , Plevoets Koen
Published: March 2014

The present study addresses the long-standing issue in corpus-based translation studies that translated texts differ from non-translated texts in the same language, irrespective of text type or source language. We investigate whether this claim is empirically verifiable for a variety of lexical variables in different Dutch varieties or lects (different text types and translated versus non-translated language). By means of profile-based correspondence analysis, linguistic distances are measured and visualized between the lects. Finally, logistic regression modeling enables us to determine the exact impact of the lects on the lexical choices. The results indeed reveal significant differences between translated and non-translated texts, but – contrary to what is generally assumed – these differences are not independent of source language and text type. Keywords: corpus-based translation studies; conservatism, lexical onomasiological variation; correspondence analysis; logistic regression
Formal and functional variation of lexical bundles in biomedical English
Authors: Salazar Danica , Verdaguer Isabel , Laso Natalia Judith , Comelles Elisabet , Castaño Castaño Emilia , Hilferty Joseph
Published: March 2014

This study is an investigation of the morphosyntactic, lexical and functional variation of lexical bundles in scientific writing. In this chapter, we discuss the various methodological issues involved in the analysis of the structural variability and multifunctionality of lexical bundles, and the methodological approach we developed to address these variations. This approach involved grouping lexical bundles by shared keywords, applying the notion of prototypical bundle (Salazar 2011) and assigning lexical bundles to functions rather than linking pre-established functions to individual bundles. These additional steps were central to the creation of a pedagogically and lexicographically relevant list of lexical bundles for inclusion in SciE-Lex.
A cross-disciplinary analysis of personal and impersonal features in English and Spanish scientific writing
Authors: Salazar Danica , Ventura Aaron , Verdaguer Isabel
Published: March 2014

This study is a corpus-based, cross-linguistic and cross-disciplinary analysis of impersonal and personal constructions in scientific texts. Passive structures (to be + past participle) and personal expressions (first-person pronouns) were extracted from a corpus of research articles taken from an English medical journal and a similar corpus of articles from an English mathematics journal. Corresponding Spanish passive constructions (se + active verb form and ser + past participle) and personal structures (verbs ending in -mos, first-person pronouns) were searched for in a corpus of medical research articles and a corpus of mathematics articles from Spanish-language journals. The frequency and patterns of use of both impersonal and personal features are compared across the four corpora to identify language- and discipline-specific preferences. The qualitative analysis of these structures sheds light on the textual functions they perform in different sections of the text. The results of the study demonstrate that in both English and Spanish, the choice between personal and impersonal constructions depends largely on the discipline and the author’s rhetorical aims. While the empirical, experiment-based field of Medicine is characterised by a prevalence of passive features that serve to reduce authorial presence in the description of scientific procedures, there is a marked preference for personal rather than impersonal forms in the more abstract, logic-based discipline of Mathematics, where authors are expected to guide their readers through an often convoluted chain of reasoning.
Learner corpora
Authors: Díaz-Negrillo Ana , Thompson Paul
Published: March 2014

Although still a relatively young field, learner corpus research is showing a remarkable rate of development that extends beyond corpus linguistics to other areas such as FLT, SLA research and, more recently, computational linguistics. This paper presents a state of the art overview of learner corpus research which illustrates the wide range of uses, users and activities that surround learner corpora. It provides a critical appraisal of what has been done so far and points to future lines of research.
Learner corpora and second language acquisition
Authors: Lozano Cristóbal , Mendikoetxea Amaya
Published: March 2014

Second language acquisition (SLA) research has traditionally relied on elicited experimental data, and it has disfavoured natural language use data. Learner corpus research has the potential to change this but, to date, the research has contributed little to the interpretation of L2 acquisition, and some of the corpora are flawed in design. We analyse the reasons why many SLA researchers are still reticent about using corpora, and how good corpus design and adequate tools to annotate and search corpora can help overcome some of the problems observed. We do so by describing how the ten standard principles used in corpus design (Sinclair 2005) were applied to the design of CEDEL2, a large learner corpus of L1 English – L2 Spanish (Lozano 2009a).
Competing target hypotheses in the Falko corpus
Authors: Reznicek Marc , Lüdeling Anke , Hirschmann Hagen
Published: March 2014

Error annotation is a key feature of modern learner corpora. Error identification is always based on some kind of reconstructed learner utterance (target hypothesis). Since a single target hypothesis can only cover a certain amount of linguistic information while ignoring other aspects, the need for multiple target hypotheses becomes apparent. Using the German learner corpus Falko as an example, we therefore argue for a flexible multi-layer stand-off corpus architecture where competing target hypotheses can be coded in parallel. Surface differences between the learner text and the target hypotheses can then be exploited for automatic error annotation.
Automatic suprasegmental parameter extraction in learner corpora
Authors: Ferragne Emmanuel
Published: March 2014

In this chapter, an attempt is made to compute automatically suprasegmental – and, in particular, rhythmic – parameters that could be used to distinguish between a group of French learners of English and a group of native speakers. As a preliminary step, an automatic segmentation algorithm is benchmarked against manual segmentation. This assessment then leads us to reject the classic duration-based rhythm metrics and adopt alternative measurements involving pitch and intensity. Finally, we use an automatic classifier to check to what extent our metrics predict a reliable boundary between learner and native speech.
Prosody in a contrastive learner corpus
Authors: Tortel Anne
Published: March 2014

This article presents the detailed description, constitution and rhythm analyses of an oral English L1/L2 learner corpus spoken by both native speakers of British English (L1) and French learners of English (L2). This contrastive learner database called ANGLISH was designed at the University of Provence at the Parole et Langage laboratory for a PhD project. So far, it has been used to study the rhythm of learners’ productions. The method used is a comparative analysis of French and native speakers’ productions using several recently-developed rhythm metrics with focus on the reading part of the ANGLISH corpus. The final aim is to set up an objective evaluation which could be implemented in computer-assisted systems for teaching English prosody.
Chapter 5. In the beginning was the word
Authors: Hansen Lynne , Lam Karri , Orikasa Nufer Livia , Rama Paul , Schwaller Geraldine , Miller Ronald M.
Published: March 2014

This chapter examines vocabulary acquisition by adult learners of six mission languages: German, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Portuguese and Spanish. Although the data show little relationship between pre-mission L2 exposure and mission vocabulary acquisition, the length of exposure time on the mission is a robust predictor of lexical attainment. Words tend to be acquired more quickly by learners of the European languages than the Asian, with no significant gender difference overall. Affect is most positive during the MTC intensive course, decreasing significantly upon arrival in the foreign culture. A regression analysis indicates that the variables which contribute significantly to missionary vocabulary attainment are time on mission, language distance, motivation, attitude, and belief in a spiritual component in language learning.
Chapter 7. Vocabulary attrition in adult speakers of Spanish as a second language
Authors: Graham C. Ray
Published: March 2014

This paper examines the vocabulary attrition of fifteen adult English-speaking learners of Spanish who had reached high levels of Spanish proficiency through 18 to 24 months of residence in Spanish-speaking countries as missionaries. Approximately forty minutes of speech was recorded for the subjects on each of four occasions over a period of fifteen years following their separation from the host country in which Spanish was used. Using a framework derived from Nation (2001), the paper examines various aspects of the kinds of knowledge lost by the subjects including their knowledge of the forms of words, the inflectional and derivational morphology associated with these words, the meanings of the words, the grammatical constraints placed on the words, and the use of the words in various collocations. The data on attrition are discussed in terms of various accounts of vocabulary acquisition and loss, including those of Meara (2004) Kroll and Sunderman (2003) and Nation (2001).
Language ideologies and language attitudes
Authors: Cavanaugh Jillian R.
Published: March 2014

In the early 1990s, linguistic anthropological work seeking to integrate speakers’ perceptions and understandings of their linguistic and social contexts into analyses of language use coalesced around the theoretical paradigm of language ideology. This perspective includes both micro-interactional elements of language use as well as large-scale sociohistorical processes that shape and are shaped by language. This article first describes language ideology as a field, and describes some of its key works. Next it shifts to discuss language ideology through an analysis of the language situation in Bergamo, Italy, where ongoing language shift, socioeconomic transformation, and the politicization of language have resulted in a complex linguistic situation and a range of attitudes towards language. Based on ongoing cultural and linguistic ethnographic research in Bergamo since 1999, this paper illustrates how analyses of speaker attitudes from a language ideology perspective can produce a rich, multiplex understanding of how speakers themselves use and understand language.
The Present Perfect in Cypriot Greek revisited
Authors: Melissaropoulou Dimitra , Themistocleous Charalambos , Tsiplakou Stavroula , Tsolakidis Simeon
Published: March 2014

This paper examines the emergence of innovative Present Perfect structures in the Cypriot Greek koiné through a quantitative study supplemented by naturalistically sampled data. The results of the study indicate that innovative Present Perfect structures are emergent in contemporary Cypriot Greek, at least among its younger, more educated speakers. Although such innovation on the morphosyntactic level may well be a result of language contact with Standard Greek, it does not entail perfect acquisition or transfer of the full range of associated semantic features of Standard Greek Present Perfect. Conversely, it seems that transfer of the exclusively resultative semantics of extant, non-innovative Cypriot Greek Present Perfect structures onto the innovative Present Perfect is not operative either.
And the beat goes on
Authors: Rothmayr Antonia
Published: March 2014

This paper addresses microvariation within verb cluster constructions in varieties of German, focusing on Verb Raising and Verb Projection Raising in Alemannic. It is argued that the difference in the syntax of verb clusters arises because of differences in the prosodic systems of the dialects (stress-timed vs. syllable-timed languages). The paper includes an overview of the empirical properties of the Alemannic phonological phrase and an analysis of the syntax of verb clusters based on PF-requirements.
Migrant teenagers’ acquisition of sociolinguistic variation
Authors: Schleef Erik
Published: March 2014

This paper investigates the acquisition of the sociolinguistic constraints of two variables, (ing) and (t), by non-native teenagers of Polish origin in both London and Edinburgh. First, the native sociolinguistic constraints on variation of (ing) and (t) are identified. These are then compared with the sociolinguistic constraints of two groups of non-native teenagers living in London and Edinburgh. Results of a multivariate analysis indicate that Polish adolescent immigrants do not acquire the exact same constraints on variation as their local peer group, and that the acquisition of variation varies from variable to variable, which may be due to the character of the variable and its constraint complexity. Learners seem to be using various strategies when acquiring variation in the realisation of these variables in the English of the speech community into which they have moved. While some variable constraints are replicated, there is also evidence of reallocation of the relative importance of variable input constraints in the output variation. Some constraints are altered, rejected and newly constructed, which seems more likely with some kinds of structured variation than others.
Beyond narrative coherence
Authors: Hyvärinen Matti , Hydén Lars-Christer , Saarenheimo Marja , Tamboukou Maria
Published: March 2014

The introduction suggests a paradigmatic turn in narrative studies as regards the coherence thesis. The classical, Aristotelian, notion has been widely shared among scholars who otherwise often disagree, often drastically, from folklore and linguistics to philosophy, psychology and narrativist theory of history. Once and again, the key function of narrative is seen to be the creation of coherence. Recently, this conception has faced increasing criticism both from the ranks of narratology and in particular, from scholars who study “naturally occurring”, oral narratives. The normative mission to find and value coherence marginalizes many narrative phenomena, omits non-fitting narrators, encourages scholars to read narratives obsessively from the perspective of coherence, and poses ethically questionable pressures upon narrators who have experienced severe political or other trauma.
‘Mind-reading’, a method for understanding the broken narrative of an aphasic man
Authors: Aaltonen Tarja
Published: March 2014

An aphasic man tells, an extremely fragmented, excited, and hard-to-comprehend “story.” The aim of this article is to mobilize ideas from conversation analysis (CA) and cognitive narratology, in particular those related to “mind reading,” in making sense of the problematic story and the interactional process in which the story was processed and endorsed. In cognitive narratology, it is widely assumed that people routinely interpret and misinterpret other people’s minds. This capacity to cross over the limits of the “intramental” mind and to flexibly use the resources of the “intermental” mind may become vital in situations involving severe speech and communication impediments. The experience from such cases of storytelling and comprehension may enhance the understanding of co-authoring of narratives in general.
Interfaces in teaching narratives
Authors: Andrews Molly , Squire Corinne , Tamboukou Maria
Published: March 2014

This chapter is co-written by the three directors of the Centre for Narrative Research at the University of East London, UK and consists of their reflections
on teaching narrative to post-graduate students in Britain. The organisation of
the chapter is in three different voices, reflecting the design and teaching of the actual course. There is a general introduction about the course we teach: the genesis of the course, the use of formalisations in making sense of the field of narrative, connecting our classroom to our research centre (and to our own research), and discussing how the course has evolved over the years (including the provision of a distance learning version of the course). The chapter concludes with reflections on some of the challenges and rewards which we have encountered in our experience of teaching narrative, drawing on students' responses and discussion, and will include questions around how to respond to students who are in search of a ‘quick fix’ methodology, or how to balance our different approaches, amongst others.
The circle game
Authors: Gidron Ariela , Turniansky Bobbie , Tuval Smadar , Mansur Ruth , Barak Judith
Published: March 2014

ACE (Active, Collaborative Education), a post-graduate teacher education programme (pre-school -12 and special education), is based on the Aristotelian understanding of ‘Phronesis’, that sees teaching as a profession based on practical knowledge and ways of being that are context related and learnt through practice and the study of practice, rather than a profession based on ‘implementing theory’. Thus the everyday situations of being in schools with children grow to be the major texts which are written and interpreted. In this context the narrative inquiry approach has become a way of life in the programme, serving as a framework that invites both students and teacher educators to purposefully bring their stories, personal and professional, into the different learning communities and construct personal and shared wisdom of practice. However, like the teaching profession itself, we claim that narrative inquiry is an artful skill, a practical wisdom. Although it can be taught theoretically, it cannot be learned without being engaged in it in practice. In this chapter we tell three stories related to circles of narrative inquiry as a way of life in ACE.
Scrapbooks and messy texts
Authors: Reed Malcolm , Speedy Jane
Published: March 2014

In this reflective piece we draw directly on our experience of teaching a variety of methodological approaches to narrative inquiry at doctoral level. We take a tentative approach in which we draw out temporal, contextual and relational threads of what it may mean to be doing narrative inquiry. This deliberate lack of fixedness and engagement with messiness in our approach displays our intention to develop and promote artful inquiries in which we are mindful of how aesthetic, ethical and personal responses both shape and are shaped by our explorations. We draw on examples and images of our students' work as well as our own to illustrate aspects of the nomadic journey we venture on and the texts of the field we make. Excerpts of discussion between us are woven into our account to voice dialogically our agreement and difference and show the manner in which inquirers usefully bump up against each other as we collaborate.
There are times in my life to which I return like a cat scratching, licking, worrying at an old sore, a long since exterminated nest of fleas behind my ear I am sure that if I keep poking and rubbing that old itch will finally be quelled. (Piercy 1983, p. 30)
Chapter 1. Identity and empathy
Authors: Meuter Norbert
Published: March 2014

In Oneself as Another Ricœur speaks of the “ethical implication of the narrative” (p. 163). In the meantime, a “Narrative Ethics” has formed around the question of whether such implications exist and how they might appear. Narratives are not merely permeated by specific moral contents, values and norms but – such is the more fundamental thesis – the phenomenon of morality as such is constituted only in and through narratives. The following considerations aim to contribute to this subject. The terms narrativity (1) and morality (2) are to be defined in a way indicating possible correlations (3). The central thesis is: Moral experience and acting are fundamentally based on processes of identity and empathy formation, and narratives enable, create, stabilize and energize both identity and empathy.
Chapter 3. The quest for a third space
Authors: Kraus Wolfgang
Published: March 2014

While a narrative approach to the construction of identity opens up quite “naturally” to the question of who I am in time, i.e. to a temporal order, it is inclined to neglect the question of who I am part of, i.e. of belonging. This essay argues that the adherence to a plurality of social worlds provides the teller with options of self-positioning in his or her self-narratives. Even within the confinement of a limited story world a whole variety of self-positions is regularly evoked. Social exclusion, on the other hand, can be described in positioning theory as the experience of other positioning, of being positioned by dominant others. Other positioning endangers the possibility of narrating oneself as an agent in one’s own self-stories and consequently obstructs the process of identity construction. This raises the question how individuals manage to maintain the dynamics of self-positioning in self stories, which are largely shaped by the experience of social exclusion. To answer this question, Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopias as used by Kevin Hetherington is discussed as the conceptualization of a – real – social world, which is related to the dominant social order in an ambivalent way. Heterotopias offer the experience of a third space, beyond the binary logics of an “either-or” or “in-out” and thus allow for the development of self-positions beyond these oppositions. Two empirical examples of heterotopic self-positioning are presented. The characteristics of these narratives are discussed.
Chapter 5. Referential frameworks and focalization in a craft artist’s life story
Authors: Mildorf Jarmila
Published: March 2014

This chapter explores the roles perspective can play in conversational storytelling (e.g. creating involvement, sympathy and bonding) and to what extent literary narratology can offer useful terms to describe perspective-taking in such contexts. The chapter traces instances of focalization in the referential frameworks of a craft artist’s life interview. It illustrates how the interviewee positions himself within the interview and in his narrative and how he also invites the interviewer to partially adopt his position.
Why narrative is here to stay
Authors: Freeman Mark
Published: March 2014

The main purpose of the present chapter is to return to some of the intellectual movements and motives that gave rise to the “narrative turn” and, in so doing, provide a substantive rationale for why narrative inquiry is nothing short of a necessity in exploring the human realm. Acknowledging that there were many such movements and motives, spanning both the humanities and the social sciences, I suggest herein that the seminal work of Paul Ricoeur provides the most thorough, philosophically compelling, account of why narrative is here to stay. Following discussion of Ricoeur’s work, I explore the story of an elderly woman with dementia, demonstrating that as the narrative self increasingly becomes diminished, so too does one’s connection to reality. This suggests that even if we do not quite live narratives, as some have argued, truly moving beyond them can be devastating. It also suggests that narrative knowing, rather than being seen as the “imposition” it is sometimes seen to be, should instead be seen as an integral to fully functioning human life.
To the narrative turn and back
Authors: Guaraldo Olivia
Published: March 2014

Narrative entered the inaugural political practices of second wave feminism long before it became an academic topic of research, and identity was for feminists a practice of autobiographical disclosure before being the recognition of a commonality. This chapter analyzes the ways in which the narrative practices at work in early Italian feminism offer an interesting example of the fruitful connection between politics and narration. By drawing on Hannah Arendt, Adriana Cavarero and the thought of sexual difference, this chapter briefly reconstructs the role that narrative played in feminist politics and theory. I will claim that the narrative turn in feminism not only gave voice to new political subjects and their awareness, but also contributed to renewed notions of subjectivity, embodied self, the relation between self and other.
Making sense in autobiography
Authors: Hatavara Mari
Published: March 2014

This chapter discusses two autobiographies, one genuine and one fictional, with emphasis on the textuality of literature. The analysis does not seek a demarcation line between fact and fiction, but studies two literary texts as sites of sense-making. The aim is to demonstrate that a literary text offers multiple possibilities not only to thematise but also to embody questions of sense-making. Moreover, literary narratives withhold and unsettle the reader’s sense-making efforts. In order to make this evident, in this chapter I first analyse textual ordering, like paratexts, beginnings and ends of the autobiographies, then the modes of mediating experience in these texts, and finally, the types of minds presented. While applying some ideas from post-classical, cognitive narratology, I promote a detailed textual analysis as an essential step between theory and interpretation as exercised by classical narratology.
Storytelling on the go
Authors: Georgakopoulou Alexandra
Published: March 2014

In this chapter, I draw on a practice-based heuristic that I have put forward within small stories research so as to discuss breaking news as a narrative genre that is currently carving out a significant place for itself in the everyday storying of people in technologically mediated environments. The heuristic aims at scrutinizing the inter-animations amongst ways of telling, sites and tellers, and of those I will single out three pervasive features of breaking news: the ongoing-ness of tellings that is premised on the requirement for the recency of events; the portability of the stories in different environments (e.g. from online to offline and vice versa); the multiple tellership and co-construction of tellings. On the basis of these features, I address the issue of how the study of breaking news can inform the current thinking around certain longstanding concerns of narrative analysis such as tellability (the story “worth telling”) and reflection (distance) in the telling of the past.
Towards an embodied theory of narrative and storytelling
Authors: Hydén Lars-Christer
Published: March 2014

It is argued that storytelling activity is grounded in the bodies of the participants, in the situation including the material artifacts, relationships, and in the organization of the storytelling. Storytelling by persons with a brain disorder (Alzheimer’s disease) is taken as a case in point of what happens when a part of the body – the brain – no longer can be used as a storytelling tool. In telling stories both storyteller and listener use a number of functional networks as resources. Telling stories is about transforming various kinds of experiences through the use of shared semiotic resources into a story that is performed and perceived multimodally by the participants. An embodied approach puts a stronger emphasis on the performance of storytelling rather than on the text.
Fractured narratives
Authors: Schiff Brian
Published: March 2014

Some psychologists have always studied what persons say about their lives, but in the late 1980s and early 1990s psychologists began to employ the concept of narrative in a self conscious manner. Over the past two decades, the amount of psychological research calling itself narrative has blossomed. Although I view this movement optimistically, I am concerned by both the over-application of the concept and the difficulties in forming a clear definition of the term. This is a problem because when concepts, such as narrative, are overused and misused, they lose their distinctiveness and risk betraying the intentions that inspired them. Intellectual domains can and should tolerate dissent and creativity. However, the conceptual tensions in narrative psychology make it vulnerable to trivialization. In particular, narrative is in danger of being reconceptualized as just another psychological variable to be studied in the same manner as other psychological variables through experimental and survey methods. I reflect upon two central conceptual tensions in narrative psychology, between theory and method and structure and function. I offer my point of view on these tensions, how they can be resolved, and the ultimate goal of narrative psychology.
Evaluation in Mandarin Chinese children’s personal narratives
Authors: Chang Chien-ju , McCabe Allyssa
Published: March 2014

Evaluation is a critical component of personal narrative, the component that conveys to listeners how narrators feel about experiences that happened to them. Evaluation conveys the impact of what actually did happen in the context of what narrators expected would happen but did not or what they wished had happened instead. This chapter presents a study of how Taiwanese children develop the ability to evaluate their narratives and a comparison of Taiwanese to English-speaking children in their use of evaluative devices. Prior research (Minami, 1994; Minami & McCabe, 1995) suggests that English-speaking mothers provide more evaluation comments in telling past experiences with their children compared to Japanese-speaking mothers. Differences in use of evaluative devices were hypothesized to be evident across Chinese- and English-speaking children in their personally experienced stories.Mandarin Chinese-speaking children from Taiwan (N = 171) and 96 English-speaking children from the United States participated in this study. Chinese-speaking children were agesd 3 to 9 years and comprised seven groups (at each of those ages). English-speaking, American children were aged 4 to 9 years and comprised six groups. Following Peterson and McCabe’s conversational map (1983), the experimenter elicited a number of personal narratives from each child. Specific prompted topics such as visit to a doctor were given in conversation. The purpose of this task was to assess children’s narrative skill without adult’s support; neutral follow-up responses such as “uh-huh,” “tell me more” were used. Evaluation was coded in Chinese using an adaptation of the system Peterson & McCabe (1983) developed to code evaluation in English-speaking American children aged four through nine years. The percentage of each type of evaluative device per narrative comment was determined and Taiwanese children were compared in this way to American children from the Peterson & McCabe corpus. Results show that Taiwanese children included many fewer evaluation comments (13–25% of the children’s clauses were partially or fully evaluative) in telling their personally experienced stories compared to American children (50% at each age). Results are interpreted as reflecting deep and pervasive cultural differences: Chinese children are socialized to have an interdependent self (with less emphasis on what an individual felt in the past), while American children are socialized to have an independent self (with early and frequent emphasis on what an individual felt in the past).
Chinese and English referential skill in Taiwanese children’s spoken narratives
Authors: Sung Ming-hui , Chang Chien-ju
Published: March 2014

This study aims to examine Chinese and English referential strategies in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners in Taiwan. Thirty sixth-grade children with three or four years of English instruction participated in this study. They were asked to narrate a wordless picture book in Chinese and English respectively. All references to the main animate characters in the stories were coded for the use of form and discourse contexts, i.e., introduction, maintenance and switching. Main results show that the children had difficulties in making appropriate referential choices in producing English narratives, especially in the context of referent introduction, which suggests that Chinese children might carry over their first language knowledge into the choice of English referential strategies. Educational implications and suggestions for the future research were discussed.
The semantics of placement and removal predicates in Moroccan Arabic
Authors: Nouaouri Nadi
Published: March 2014

This article explores the expression of placement and removal events in Moroccan Arabic, particularly the semantic features of ‘putting’ and ‘taking’ verbs, classified in accordance with their combination with Goal and/or Source NPs. Moroccan Arabic verbs encode a variety of components of placement and removal events, including containment, attachment, features of the figure, and trajectory. Furthermore, accidental events are distinguished from deliberate events either by the inherent semantics of predicates or denoted syntactically. The postures of the Figures, in spite of some predicates distinguishing them, are typically not specified as they are in other languages, such as Dutch. Although Ground locations are frequently mentioned in both source-oriented and goal-oriented clauses, they are used more often in goal-oriented clauses.
On the use of PUT Verbs by multilingual speakers of Romansh
Authors: Berthele Raphael
Published: March 2014

In this chapter, the multilingual systems of bilingual speakers of Sursilvan Romansh and German are analyzed. The Romansh and the German systems show important differences in the domain of placement. Romansh has a fairly general verb metter ‘to put’ whereas German uses different verbs (e.g., setzen ‘to set’, legen ‘to lay’, stellen ‘to stand’). Whereas there are almost no traces of German in the Romansh data elicited from the German-Romansh bilinguals, it appears that their production of German yields uses of the verbs which differ from the typical German system. Although the forms of the German verbs have been acquired by the bilingual speakers, their distribution in the data arguably reflects traces of the Romansh category of metter ‘to put’.
The expression of ‘putting’ and ‘taking’ events in Japanese
Authors: Ishibashi Miyuki
Published: March 2014

This study explores the expression of Source and Goal in describing placement and removal events in adult Japanese. Although placement and removal events a priori represent symmetry regarding the orientation of motion, their (c)overt expressions actually exhibit multiple asymmetries at various structural levels. The results show that the expression of the Source is less frequent than the expression of the Goal, but, if expressed, morphosyntactically more complex, suggesting that ‘taking’ events are more complex than ‘putting’ events in their construal. It is stressed that finer linguistic analysis is necessary before explaining linguistic asymmetries in terms of non-linguistic foundations of spatial language.
Semantic granularity of placement and removal expressions in Polish
Authors: Kopecka Anetta
Published: March 2014

This chapter explores the expression of placement (or Goal-oriented) and removal (or Source-oriented) events by speakers of Polish (a West Slavic language). Its aim is to investigate the hypothesis known as ‘Source/Goal asymmetry’ according to which languages tend to favor the expression of Goals (e.g., into, onto) and to encode them more systematically and in a more fine-grained way than Sources (e.g., from, out of). The study provides both evidence and counter-evidence for Source/Goal asymmetry. On the one hand, it shows that Polish speakers use a greater variety of verbs to convey Manner and/or mode of manipulation in the expression of placement, encoding such events in a more fine-grained manner than removal events. The expression of placement is also characterized by a greater variety of verb prefixes conveying Path and prepositional phrases (including prepositions and case markers) conveying Ground. On the other hand, the study reveals that Polish speakers attend to Sources as often as to Goals, revealing no evidence for an attentional bias toward the endpoints of events.
The dinguist’s dilemma
Authors: Matisoff James A.
Published: March 2014

This paper explores interactions between the lateral liquid l and the voiced stop d (with parenthetical remarks about n and t as well) in a variety of language families, especially Sino-Tibetan/Tibeto-Burman. These apical sounds participate both in synchronic patterns of variation and in diachronic patterns of sound change. Sometimes changes of *l > d or *d > l seem quite regular, as e.g. in the passage from Old to Middle Chinese. More often perhaps, these changes appear sporadic. Recognition of l >< d alternations in ST/TB permits the refinement of several etymologies. The phonetic similarity between these sounds accounts for the fact that they interact with such frequency in languages all over the world. Di gantse velt shteyt oyf der shpits tsung. (Yiddish proverb)
Person-sensitive TAME marking in Galo
Authors: Post Mark W.
Published: March 2014

Scott DeLancey’s analysis of person-sensitive TAME marking in Lhasa Tibetan – “a.k.a. conjunct-disjunct marking” or “egophoricity” – has stimulated considerable discussion and debate, particularly as previously little-known languages of the Tibeto-Burman area, as well as outside it, have come to be described, and a wider range of functional factors have been taken into account. This chapter is intended as a contribution to this discussion, by presenting the first detailed analysis of person-sensitive TAME marking in a language of the Tani subgroup of Tibeto-Burman, namely Galo. Like Tournadre (2008), I find that person-sensitive TAME marking in Galo is not a grammaticalized index of person (“agreement”) nor of cross-clause subject continuity, but is instead a semantic index of an assertor’s knowledge state. Unlike in more westerly Tibeto-Burman languages, however, different construals of agency and/or volition do not seem to be factors in the Galo system. Thus, there are both similarities and differences underlying systems of person-sensitive TAME marking in different Tibeto-Burman languages; this suggests that further research - particularly, employing a diachronic perspective when possible - will be required before we can confidently characterize person-sensitive TAME marking from a pan-Tibeto-Burman (or broader) cross-linguistic perspective.
The challenge of Maa ‘Away’
Authors: Payne Doris L.
Published: March 2014

All branches of Eastern Nilotic have directionals. The Maa (Maasai) away morpheme has a range of functions, including motion away, direction away, distributive action or situation, continuous aspect, a possible plurality function, an applicative-like function, and with some verbs a valence decreasing function. With some other verbs, away is simply lexicalized as part of the stem. The story of away is coherent once the core semantic function is understood, which Tucker and Mpaayei (1955) called ‘Motion Away’. However, processes of both lexicalization and grammaticalization have taken place, and the synchronic meaning of this morpheme cannot always and only be understood as indicating (even metaphorical) ‘motion away’.
Head-marking languages and linguistic theory
Authors: Van Valin Jr. Robert D.
Published: March 2014

In her path-breaking 1986 paper, Johanna Nichols proposed a typological contrast between head-marking and dependent-marking languages. Nichols argues that even though the syntactic relations between the head and its dependents are the same in both types of language, the syntactic “bond” between them is not the same; in dependent-marking languages it is one of government, whereas in head-marking languages it is one of apposition. This distinction raises an important question for linguistic theory: How can this contrast – government versus apposition – which can show up in all of the major phrasal types in a language, be captured? The purpose of this paper is to explore the various approaches that have been taken in an attempt to capture the difference between head-marked and dependent-marked syntax in different linguistic theories. The basic problem that head-marking languages pose for syntactic theory will be presented, and then generative approaches will be discussed. The analysis of head-marked structure in Role and Reference Grammar will be presented.