bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Metrical structure of the European sonnet
Authors: Aroui Jean-Louis
Published: March 2014

In the Italian sonnet, the rhyme schemes (abba, abba, cde, cde) and (abba, abba, cdc, dcd) can be analysed as the concatenation of an octave and a sestet. Without this bipartite structure, the Italian sonnet would be too complex to be perceptible. The French sonnet, with its usual forms (abba, abba, ccd, eed) and (abba, abba, ccd, ede), respects this division into two parts. Both in Italian and in French, the internal structure of the sonnet seems to be characterised by a branching form. Nevertheless, it is shown that the rhyme schemes (cdc, dcd) and (ccd, ede) include discontinuous constituents, thus the branching structure of the sonnet is quite different from those usually described in linguistics. In the English tradition, the Spenserian sonnet (abab, bcbc, cdcd, ee) and the Shakespearian sonnet (abab, cdcd, efef, gg) are not easily analysed as being formed by an octave and a sestet. It must be admitted that from a perceptual point of view, they are something entirely different: the fact they are labelled as “sonnets”, and hence seen as related to the Italian sonnet, seems to be due mainly to historical reasons and cultural conventions.
Syntactic relations in Survive-minimalism
Authors: Putnam Michael T. , Stroik Thomas
Published: March 2014

Survive-minimalism, as developed in Stroik (1999, 2009) and Putnam (2007), argues for a “crash-proof” syntax that is divested of all derivation-to-derivation and derivation-to-interface operations, such as Internal Merge and Transfer. In this paper, we extend our investigations into Minimalist syntax by showing how it is possible to derive crash-proof syntactic relations using the External Merge operation only. Central to our analysis is the active role that the Numeration plays in building derivations. We demonstrate here that our approach to syntactic relations is in many respects conceptually superior to other Minimalist alternatives, mainly on the grounds that our analysis offers a conceptually grounded explication of how a derivation begins, proceeds and (successfully) terminates without relying on theory-internal stipulations or labels. Contra Boeckx (this volume) and Ott (this volume), we conclude that an optimal design of the CHL is indeed ‘crash-proof’ after all.
Resumptive pronouns, A-binding,and levels of representations in Irish
Authors: McCloskey James
Published: March 2014

At the empirical level, this paper aims to provide a reasonably systematic overview of the distribution of resumptive pronouns in one language (Irish) and of their behaviour under certain tests. At the theoretical level, it argues that resumptive pronouns are syntactic variables (locally Ā-bound elements) and that there is a syntactically visible relation between the pronoun and its binder. It follows that it must be possible for pronouns to be directly A-bar bound. The paper also argues, however, that the pronominal character of resumptive pronouns emerges in the so-called Highest Subject Restriction which is analyzed as an anti-locality effect (reminiscent of Condition B of the Binding Theory) acting in the A-domain.
Building and interpreting nonthematic A-positions
Authors: Rezac Milan
Published: March 2014

Movement and resumption both Merge a DP in a nonthematic position and interpret it through a free variable. This predicts their symmetric distribution and the existence of resumption on the ‘core’ A-position of [Spec, TP], or A-resumption. It is argued that the prediction is correct, and mechanics are developed to build both movement and resumption by Merge, Agree, and the interpretation of nonthematic positions. A-resumption on [Spec, TP] falls into two types. When T participates in φ-Agree, the DP Merged in [Spec, TP] must be interpretively linked to the variable identified by φ-Agree. Locality tends to limit the goal to a domain where it must be a copy/gap for Case reasons, so the composition of Agree and Merge results in movement. However, when a finite TP boundary is penetrable to φ-Agree, there surfaces an A-resumption pattern constrained by the locality of φ-Agree, including the copy-raising of English The cat
i seems like it
i
’s got Spiro’s tongue. When T does not φ-Agree with a DP goal, the location of the variable interpreting [Spec, TP] is unconstrained. This is the situation in Breton, which allows A- resumption structures of the type The boati was shot at it
i. The patterns of A- resumption restricted and unrestricted by φ-Agree match parallel patterns found in A′-resumption in recent work.
Automaticity vs. feature-enhancement in the control of segmental F0
Authors: Hoole Philip , Honda Kiyoshi
Published: March 2014

Several phonological oppositions are typically accompanied by F0 differences. F0 is higher following voiceless consonants than voiced; it is also higher for high than low vowels. Analysis of cricothyroid activity aimed to determine whether these F0 differences are automatic effects contingent on the basic articulatory manoeuvres required for the oppositions of voicing and vowel height, or whether the differences reflect active enhancement strategies. Results for both oppositions suggest a hybrid model: The articulatory contingency is at the heart of the F0 differences, but these differences may be reinforced by active laryngeal adjustments. Additional analysis focused on German tense vs. lax vowels. Higher cricothyroid activity in lax vowels could explain why these vowels do not follow typical intrinsic F0 patterns. Tentative support was found.
Phonological features in infancy
Authors: Cristià Alejandrina , Seidl Amanda , Francis Alexander L.
Published: March 2014

Features serve two main functions in the phonology of languages: they encode the distinction between pairs of contrastive phonemes (distinctive function); and they delimit sets of sounds that participate in phonological processes and patterns (classificatory function). We summarize evidence from a variety of experimental paradigms bearing on the functional relevance of phonological features. This research shows that while young infants may use abstract phonological features to learn sound patterns, this ability becomes more constrained with development and experience. Furthermore, given the lack of overlap between the ability to learn a pair of words differing in a single feature and the ability to learn sound patterns based on features, we argue for the separation of the distinctive and the classificatory function.
Chapter 7. On the fronting of non-contrastive topics in Germanic
Authors: Chocano Gema
Published: March 2014

The present chapter proposes a novel account of the existence of fronted non-contrastive topics in German and its absence in Dutch. The main claim is that the relevant difference between the two languages reduces to the type of scrambling they have: only Dutch scrambling is triggered by an uninterpretable phi(person)-feature on v* (M. Richards 2008). The proposal, fully compatible with Chomsky’s (2000 and subsequent work) model of cyclic Spell-Out, is extended to cover the more restrictive pattern of non-contrastive topicalization in Swedish, absent in Danish and Norwegian.
Chapter 8. Blackjack!
Authors: Emonds Joseph E.
Published: March 2014

Adjectives in many Indo-European languages morphologically agree with the nouns they modify in gender, number and case (if the language’s nouns can differ in case). These agreeing items seem to undermine several otherwise broad generalizations about morphology, word order and phrasal stress. Mysteriously, agreement in Germanic languages is limited to pre-nominal attributes, while all adjectives agree in Romance and Slavic languages. This essay proposes to analyze adjectival agreement in terms of a “Derived Nominal Hypothesis,” which assigns agreeing adjectives a word-internal nominal structure whose head is the agreement suffix itself. Consequently, these “adjectives” are actually Nouns (by Lieber’s Right Hand Head Rule), and so qualify as unexceptional heads of NPs. This supports Abney’s controversial conjecture for pre-nominal attributive adjectives (that they are heads of NPs). The Derived Nominal Hypothesis additionally succeeds in making several traditional observations on the behavior of agreeing adjectives fully compatible with current explanatory grammatical theory. It also accounts for many previously puzzling morphological properties of agreement and its syntactic distribution in those languages on which the study primarily focuses, namely Dutch, German, Latin and Czech. To a lesser extent, the essay touches on English adjectival word order and on common properties of Spanish and Latin agreement.
Synonyms in corpus texts
Authors: Storjohann Petra
Published: March 2014

Conventional descriptions of synonymous items often concentrate on common semantic traits and the degree of semantic overlap they exhibit. Their aim is to offer classifications of synonymy rather than elucidating ways of establishing contextual meaning equivalence and the cognitive prerequisites for this. Generally, they lack explanations as to how synonymy is construed in actual language use. This paper investigates principles and cognitive devices of synonymy construction as they appear in corpus data, and focuses on questions of how meaning equivalence might be conceptualised by speakers.
An empiricist’s view of the ontology of lexical-semantic relations
Authors: Belica Cyril , Keibel Holger , Kupietz Marc , Perkuhn Rainer
Published: March 2014

Taking a usage-based perspective, lexical-semantic relations and other aspects of lexical meaning are characterised as emerging from language use. At the same time, they shape language use and therefore become manifest in corpus data. This paper discusses how this mutual influence can be taken into account in the study of these relations. An empirically driven methodology is proposed that is, as an initial step, based on self-organising clustering of comprehensive collocation profiles. Several examples demonstrate how this methodology may guide linguists in explicating our implicit knowledge of complex semantic structures. Although these example analyses are conducted for written German, the overall methodology is language-independent.
« Tiens, bonjour… Il y a longtemps que je ne t’avais pas vu ! Qu’est-ce que tu deviens ? »
Authors: Leeman Danielle , Guehria Wajih
Published: March 2014

Traditionally, the verb devenir is arranged in the verbs of state, whose syntactic definition is to introduce an attribute of the subject. However, is definitely distinguished from those verbs, concerning both the subcategorization and the selection. We test here the prepositional phrases for the assumptions previously developed, in order to explain the distributional possibilities and impossibilities weighing on the predicative adjective. It follows from this study (relating only to 30% of the words or expressions inventoried by Larousse de base, dictionary which includes only the most current French vocabulary) that, if there remains a small percentage of terms escaping from it, the advanced proposals prove overall satisfactory. From this point of view, prepositional phrases behave like free words or syntagms.
Speech act performance in workplace settings
Authors: Yates Lynda
Published: March 2014

This chapter explores how research on speech act performance can inform language teaching for workplace communication. It argues for an approach to instruction that draws on empirical evidence from a range of perspectives so that non-native speakers can understand patterns of language use, how these relate to cultural values and how individuals actually draw on them in context. Using directives and disagreements as examples, it is argued that while quantitative interlanguage and cross-cultural speech act research studies give valuable insight into how acts are performed in routine situations, speech act studies broadly conceived are needed to provide learners with insight into the rich repertoire of devices and strategies native speakers have at their disposal and how these might be used to negotiate identities at work.
Requests
Authors: Usó-Juan Esther
Published: March 2014

This chapter focuses on the speech act of requesting, which has been considered to be a face-threatening act, since its performance requires the hearer to carry out an act for the requester’s sake (Brown & Levinson, 1987). Research on the use of requests suggests that many learners have problems in performing this speech act in sociopragmatically appropriate ways. In order to avoid social misunderstandings therefore, learners’ exposure to the way requests are routinised in real contexts is of utmost importance in second language instructional contexts. Based on research on interlanguage pragmatics, this chapter presents a learner-based instructional method designed to develop learners’ sociopragmatic ability to make requests and soften their impositive tone in English as the target language. This framework provides learners with ample opportunities to be exposed to as well as practise requests in a variety of communicative situations.
Chapter 7. The L2 semantic attentional blink
Authors: Segalowitz Norman , Lacroix Guy , Job Jenelle
Published: March 2014

Second language (L2) users are typically less proficient in their L2 than in their first language. One explanation may be that the L2 requires more attentional capacity. To test this, English speakers of L2 French performed a semantic attentional blink (AB) task, in both languages. A significant AB effect was obtained in each language; however, the effect was smaller in the L2, indicating that the attention burden associated with the AB task was paradoxically lower in the L2. Also, the magnitude of the AB effect correlated positively with a measure of L2 lexical access efficiency. Results are discussed in terms of attention-based and automatic processing in L2 lexical access and in terms of their implications for L2 learning and teaching.
Chapter 1. Situating the learning-to-write and writing-to-learn dimensions of L2 writing
Authors: Manchón Rosa M.
Published: March 2014

This introductory chapter to the book serves to set the scene for both the three strands of research reviewed in Part I (learning to write, writing to learn content, and writing to learn language), and for the empirical studies contained in Part II. It does so by situating the learning-to-write and writing-to-learn perspectives explored in the book in second language (L2) writing and second language acquisition (SLA) scholarship. The aims of the book are accounted for against this background, emphasizing the way in which the collections helps to expand the L2 writing and SLA research agendas. This is complemented with an overview of the structure of the book and of the different chapters in it.
Language and ethnicity in a European context
Authors: Haarmann Harald
Published: March 2014

The making of Europe is an ongoing process, and this concerns the emergence of new states with new constellations of majorities and minorities, changes of demographic patterns caused by internal European migrations and demographic influx from outside Europe, changes of the political status of ethnic groups and their languages. Language-related boundary-marking of ethnic identity occupies a pivotal role in these processes, producing various scenarios of contact and conflict between ethnic groups throughout Europe. In order to perceive the magnitude of this phenomenon it is necessary to inspect the infrastructure of the complex concept “ethnicity” and to shed light on how ethnic processes have been conceptualized in the history of European reasoning.
The development of Finnish into a national language
Authors: Saari Mirja
Published: March 2014

Finnish was developed into a literary language in connection with the Lutheran Reformation in the 16th century. The first texts in Finnish were translations of the New Testament and other religious literature. Having been a part of the Kingdom of Sweden for six centuries, Finland came under Russian rule in 1809 with considerable autonomy. The new political situation, in combination with the national and liberal movements in Europe, encouraged further development of Finnish, which acquired a central position in the nation-building process, and it was developed into a language for all domains towards the end of the century. In 2011, it has more than 4.8 million mother-tongue speakers in Finland.
Traces of monolingual and plurilingual ideologies in the history of language policies in France
Authors: Lüdi Georges
Published: March 2014

French is often quoted as the forerunner and model of a very normative and top-down managed language, following the language policy of an archetypal monolingual nation-state, be it France, Quebec or other French-speaking communities in the world. This particular contribution is not going to prove the contrary. However, we will try to show that even the French language and the French-speaking nations are not as much of a monolithic block as they are frequently perceived to be. At different moments in history other ideologies on the French language appeared. They concerned, on the one hand, the relationship between “French” and other languages – historical minorities and immigrant languages – and, on the other hand, the attitudes towards different varieties of French. In other words, the history of French must take into account three different elements: (a) the elaboration, over the centuries, of the endoxa, that is the official ideology, fixed in the dominant discourse; (b) the existence and, at some moments in history, prioritization of other types of discourse, manifesting more or less opposite opinions; (c) the fact that different beliefs may co-exist, that contradictory voices can be heard simultaneously at certain moments and also struggle in the arena of public discourse, enabling the (en)doxa to be polyphonic.
Dutch in Belgium
Authors: De Caluwé Johan
Published: March 2014

Standardization of Dutch in Belgium (Flanders) was mainly a 20th century phenomenon, whereby the Dutch of the Netherlands was introduced as an exogenous model. The relation between standardization and multilingualism has changed over time. During the long 19th century, there was Dutch-French multilingualism on the level of society, but hardly on the individual level. The larger first half of the 20th century saw a growing individual multilingualism Dutch-French, whereas from about 1968 onwards both societal and individual multilingualism seem to be on the decline. This is due to a very restrictive language policy, inspired by the ambition of policy makers to establish standard Dutch as the unique variety in as many domains as possible of both public and private communication.
Chapter 3. Multilingualism and diversity management in companies in the Upper Rhine Region
Authors: Lüdi Georges , Höchle Meier Katharina , Yanaprasart Patchareerat
Published: March 2014

The world’s increasing globalisation requires more interaction among people from diverse settings. Maximising on workplace diversity has become an important issue for management today. Many empirical studies clearly show that the management of linguistic diversity is of central importance to both strategic and operational processes. An important part of the preceding research concentrated on a shift of companies’ language to English as a lingua franca, being advised as a constructive source of mutual intelligibility, allowing for more effective communication. Our work is based on a “multilingual mentality”. The basic questions are how, and under what conditions, “multilingual solutions” are a genuine advantage for businesses. The aim is to understand, on the one hand, to what extent companies in the Upper Rhine Region conceive their corporate identity and organise their patterns of language use, but also the impact of their language management measures and, on the other hand, in what way individuals’ multilingual repertoires evolve into a communicative and strategic resource in organisational and professional interactions in mixed teams. The observed practices lead to a fresh view on multilingualism, based on two complementary conceptions: “institutional multilingualism” (largely additive) and “multilanguaging” (exploiting integrated individual plurilingual repertoires).
Chapter 5. A social representational perspective on languages and their management in the Danish corporate sector
Authors: Millar Sharon , Cifuentes Sylvie , Jensen Astrid
Published: March 2014

The chapter reports the main results from an investigation into the social representations of multilingualism in the Danish corporate sector. Within the framework of social representation theory, which seeks to understand the nature of social knowledge and thinking, interview data from 12 Danish companies have been analysed with a view to exploring the representations of (a) German, French, Spanish, Chinese and (b) foreign language learning. In addition, the nature of corporate approaches to language are investigated, including the use of English as a corporate language, the use of native speakers, in-service language training, and the language requirements and assessment measures applied when recruiting. The analyses reveal that specific languages are represented differently but using the same categories of aesthetics, complexity, utility and status. Language learning is anchored in characteristics of the learner and the learning process. There is evidence that people see language learning as a special skill and that informal learning is evaluated more positively than formal, classroom learning. Tension surrounds understandings of language competence, which fluctuate between ideals of perfection and the pragmatics of actual use. With regard to language management, companies generally do not have any systematic strategy. Even when companies have adopted English as a corporate language, there is no explicit formulation about what this entails and individuals may represent the actual concept differently. In relation to languages other than English, there is a tendency for the multinational company to outsource its multilingual needs from the Danish head office to native-speaking employees in affiliates or agents based in foreign markets.
Chapter 9. EU and lesser-used languages
Authors: Stritar Mojca , Stabej Marko
Published: March 2014

The compatibility between multilingual language policies and the possibilities to use Slovene (as a case-study for lesser-used languages) was researched at the levels of EU institutions and Slovene national politics. In EU institutions, linguistic diversity and the use of Slovene language have a formal, symbolic value while the backstage linguistic habitus is marked by the predominance of English/French, with the majority of Slovene representatives supporting the current linguistic regime. At the level of Slovene political institutions, the protectionist ideology is still prevalent. The new supranational context is mostly perceived as an opportunity to strengthen Slovene language while multilingual guidelines are implemented only when demanded by the EU.
Chapter 10. Dynamics of multilingualism in post-Enlargement EU institutions
Authors: Krzyżanowski Michał , Wodak Ruth
Published: March 2014

In our chapter, we present a multilevel approach to multilingualism in the European Union (i.e. EU) Institutions. We explore the diversity of the Union’s institutional language regimes and regulations from the point of view of their perceptions, conceptions and practices. We juxtapose the EU-relevant language ideologies (perceptions, conceptions) with the ways in which multilingualism is de facto regulated and practiced in the Union’s institutional spaces. In this way, we observe how multilingualism in the EU institutions changes and how, inculcated in the process of the Union’s ongoing change, it quickly becomes one of the key facets of the transformation of Europe’s supranational polity. Our research provides a differentiated and critical perspective on how language ideologies related to multilingualism are conceptualised in EU language policies, in the Union’s supranational institutional contexts as well as in communication between EU institutions and Europe’s national milieus (national public spheres, EU member states). The key findings in all areas of our research point to the lack of coherent multilingualism policies in the EU as a multilevel system of governance. Our work also emphasises the need for further multilevel studies on internal and external aspects of EU-institutional multilingualism in order to set foundations for an ongoing academic reflection on the future shape of the EU as a space of political and organisational practice based on open and inclusive multilingualism.
Chapter 11. Accomplishing multilingualism through plurilingual activities
Authors: Nussbaum Luci , Moore Emilee , Borràs Eulalia
Published: March 2014

This chapter studies the dynamics between existing bilingualism and developing international agendas at two Catalan public universities. It explores multilingualism as illustrated in interaction, tracking links between plurilingual practices and knowledge construction. The data are primarily from L2-medium academic content classes (ELF or CLIL), although interactional data from other institutional settings are drawn on in portraying practices. The study follows qualitative and emic approaches; the field was constructed ethnographically, while conversation analytic procedures guide the analysis of interaction. The results demonstrate how, in non-classroom events, participants align with policies through their use of local languages and English – categorised as a tool for practising internationalisation. Other languages are also present, although they lack relevant status in policies. In these settings, the practices in a plurilingual mode allow local participants to achieve the goals of internationalisation and also create a pleasant social environment. Classroom data document the emergence of practices in a plurilingual mode, although these are less frequent in ELF than in CLIL classes. Plurilingual practices are traced mainly in dialogical sequences, while they also occur in students’ written notes. The data suggest that the plurilingual mode enhances student participation, allows members to achieve their goals, and creates a favourable framework for an in-depth processing of academic content. Plurilingual practices are not portrayed in official documents. Despite being revealed empirically to be an everyday reality, hybrid language uses or plurilanguaging are not promoted as a potential knowledge construction tool or as a key resource for ‘doing internationalisation’.
Conversationalists and confidants
Authors: Boden Margaret A.
Published: March 2014

If there were an abstract for this very short paper, it would be this: “Conversationalists, maybe – but confidants?”
A Companion for learning in everyday life
Authors: Eynon Rebecca , Davies Chris
Published: March 2014

The use of the Companion could have broad learning benefits. For example, cenabling learners to have control over their projects of learning could potentially lead to improved level of self efficacy beliefs (Kim and Balyor, 2006), cimproved IT skills or a general confidence to try new things. We believe that this broader view of the benefits of such a Companion makes the positive cimplications outweigh the negative.
Linguistic resources for Arabic machine translation
Authors: Bies Ann , DiPersio Denise , Maamouri Mohamed
Published: March 2014

In this chapter, we describe the linguistic resources particularly suitable for Arabic machine translation research and technology development that are published by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC). A significant number of the data sets developed by LDC are Arabic language resources, making LDC the leading source for such materials. LDC’s Arabic language resources represent all of the data types in LDC’s Catalog: speech, text, video and lexicons. Much of this data has already been used for machine translation research, as represented in this volume and throughout the field, and new datasets in the pipeline are expected to benefit machine translation work as well.
Developmental schedules
Authors: Pienemann Manfred
Published: March 2014

In this chapter one of the key descriptive facts about second language acquisition is introduced. All learners follow set stages of acquisition. This observation is illustrated with English question formation and a number of regularities in word order and morphology. The chapter also contains study questions which give the reader an opportunity to apply the descriptive statements about ESL development to the analysis of authentic learner language.
Research methodology
Authors: Keßler Jörg-U. , Pienemann Manfred
Published: March 2014

PT-based studies make testable claims about language acquisition. Any study of language acquisition that makes testable claims needs to be based on observations of the acquisition process. One major method of observation (used both in research on child language as well as second language acquisition) is observation based on corpora of naturally occurring or elicited conversations. As Processability Theory has been substantiated by an extensive amount of corpus data across various second languages, we will concentrate on how to collect and analyze corpus data in this chapter.1 In particular, we will take a closer look at the following aspects of using corpus data in studies of SLA:
Data collection
Transcription
Finding regularities: Data analysis and implicational scaling What counts as acquired? Data density and acquisition criteria
Pidgins and creoles
Authors: Plag Ingo
Published: March 2014

This chapter discusses pidgin and creole languages, that is languages that have emerged in contact situations in which second language acquisition has played a prominent role. It is shown that the creation of many of the morphosyntactic structures we find in these contact languages can be attributed to universal traits of SLA processing. Processability Theory is applied to pidgin and creole inflectional and syntactic structure and it turns out that this theory can help to explain the cross-linguistic similarity of the pertinent structures, and also the provenance of language-particular structures in these varieties.
Interlocutory logic
Authors: Trognon Alain , Batt Martine
Published: March 2014

After exhibiting the historical and epistemic context of the discovery of the interaction order, the authors develop a global theory of the cognitive-affective-social organization of talk-in-interaction: «Interlocutory Logic». On the basis of insights provided by the pragmatics of natural languages and the theory and methods of contemporary logic, this theory deals with elementary illocutionary acts and higher-order units (turns, exchanges) of conversation with the help of methods of natural deduction and dialogical logic. The authors present a model constructed within the empirical domain of functional dialogues during «hand-overs» between work-shifts in a factory to demonstrate the descriptive and explicative values of «Interlocutory Logic».
Beyond symbols
Authors: Cowley Stephen J.
Published: March 2014

Humans often contextualize without using cues. While Gumperz showed that analysis is not sufficient to explain interaction, his view of what lay beyond symbols was based in cognitive internalism. Opposing this, prosody can be shown to contribute directly to conversational sense-making. Humans use self-organizing dynamics in ways that resemble what happens in gas-lasers. Voices attract each other and, at times, set off laser like synergies. Using these effects, we modulate our actions in situation-transcending events that give sense to the dynamics. Conversation is distributed cognition during which prosodic sense-making links the world with brains and bodies. Far from being based in word-forms, interaction and language are dynamical first and symbolic afterwards.
Studying interaction in order to cultivate communicative practices
Authors: Tracy Karen , Craig Robert T.
Published: March 2014

Action-implicative discourse analysis (AIDA) is an ethnographically informed discourse-analytic approach that works to provide normative understandings of situated communicative practices that are action-implicative for social life. Extending the logic of grounded practical theory (Craig and Tracy 1995), AIDA develops reconstructed accounts of the communicative problems, interaction strategies, and normative ideals of a practice. We introduce AIDA and illustrate the approach with an example from recent research on school board meetings in an American local community. We compare AIDA with other approaches to language and social interaction, focusing on interactional sociolinguistics (Gumperz) and conversation analysis (Schegloff). We argue that to understand the distinctive character of these approaches requires recognizing each one’s orientation to the discursive context of a particular academic discipline.
Interacting with difficulty
Authors: Armstrong Elizabeth , Ferguson Alison
Published: March 2014

Following brain damage after stroke, a language disorder known as aphasia can significantly interfere with conversational flow due to both the individual’s difficulties with word-finding and grammar, as well as their conversational partner’s ability to deal with such difficulties. This chapter explores the kinds of analyses used to date to illuminate the nature of interactions involving people with aphasia and their conversational partners, and the difficulties they encounter. In particular, Conversation Analysis (1977) and Systemic Functional Linguistics approaches (Halliday 1994) are discussed, and the challenges involved in applying such frameworks to clinical populations are examined.
Ecologies of gesture
Authors: Streeck Jürgen
Published: March 2014

This chapter presents a heuristic of ways in which hand-gestures participate in communicative interaction. Rather than conceiving gesture as part of language, an ecological perspective is proposed, and gestures are examined both in relation to sequences of social actions and to the ecological context. This broader account of gesture requires a different conception of the human body than is commonly presupposed by researchers of “nonverbal communication”: a model of the body not as an instrument of expression, but as a skilled (knowing) inhabitant of worlds.
Dialogical dynamics
Authors: Shotter John
Published: March 2014

As I see it, all communication begins in, and continues with, our living, spontaneous, expressive-responsive (gestural), bodily activities that occur in the meetings between ourselves and the others and othenesses around us. Indeed, as living, embodied beings, we cannot not be responsive in some fashion to the expressions of others (spoken, written, or otherwise), and to other kinds of events, occurring in our immediate surroundings. In this article I outline methods for exploring the unfolding dynamics of our utterances in their speaking and how they can give rise to a ‘shaped’ and ‘vectored’ sense of our moment-by-moment changing placement within the situation of our talk – engendering in us both unique anticipations as to what-next might happen along with, so to speak, ‘action-guiding advisories’ as to what-next we might do.
Discourse and context in a historical perspective
Authors: Hiltunen Risto
Published: March 2014

The article stresses the importance for historical discourse linguistics of contextualising texts, using the Salem witchcraft documents of 1692 as an example. A contextual analysis presupposes taking into account a number of variables with a potential impact on the discourse. Here I discuss the following issues: (a) the historical, social and cultural context, involving not only the historical background and social structures of Salem, but also considerations of the “invisible” world of witchcraft; (b) the legal context, involving the genre conventions shaping the records; (c) the scribal context, involving the representation of original spoken discourse in writing, and (d) the communicative context, involving the discourse strategies of the actual trials. Such considerations will be crucial both for the interpretation of the documents and for understanding the verbal behaviour of the parties at the trials.
Pluractional verbs that grammaticise number through the part-of relation
Authors: Tovena Lucia M.
Published: March 2014

This paper pursues an analysis of verbs like Italian mordicchiare (nibble) as event-internal pluractional verbs that denote composite single events where the predicate is distributed on the fragments of one entity, and grammaticise a local form of number through the part-of relation. This opens the possibility of reading number marking in aspectual terms, whereby fragmenting is a form of modification that perturbs the mapping between event and object.
On sentence-internal le même (‘the same’) in French and pluractionality
Authors: Charnavel Isabelle
Published: March 2014

This paper focuses on the sentence-internal reading of French le même (‘the same’)and addresses two main issues:
a. the problem of definiteness (le même does not behave the way
standard definites do);
b. the problem of compositionality (the plural licenser that même needs to get interpreted is not adjacent to it).
I propose that:
a. le même is a complex determiner with specific properties with respect to presupposition and specificity;
b. le même is an existential quantifier over a plural event that is partitioned along participants or times.
This licensing condition (plural event distributed through participants or times) relates même to the notion of pluractionality.
The valuation of gender agreement in DP
Authors: Gutiérrez-Rexach Javier , Sessarego Sandro
Published: March 2014

This paper analyzes gender agreement in the Determiner Phrase in Afro-Bolivian Spanish. Our data shows a case of cross-generational change, transitioning from a basilectal Afro-Bolivian variety to the more prestigious standard Bolivian Spanish. Recent minimalist models account for variability as the differential specification and computation of uninterpretable features in a derivation. We argue that dialectal variation and change in ABS, even if externally driven by social factors, follow from feature valuation and checking and from the interplay between computational and evolutionary demands.
(Definite) denotation and case in Romance
Authors: Manzini Maria Rita , Savoia Leonardo Maria
Published: March 2014

Recent minimalist approaches have reduced case to independent primitives (agreement, Tense) – but without any connection to its morphological expression. To solve this dichotomy, we consider the Latin -s case ending. Rejecting default treatments, we conclude that -s is associated with denotational, operator properties. These can be read as the set forming operator i.e. plural; as the inclusion operator, i.e. partitive, possessor, etc. (in a word ‘oblique’); or as the quantificational closure of EPP contexts (‘nominative’). These properties are preserved in the two-case declension of medieval Gallo-Romance, and in its residues in Romansh varieties. Thus so-called case is a denotational, ‘determiner-like’ element, with consequences for the classical historical correlation between loss of Latin case and development of the Romance determiner system.
On verbal duplication in River Plate Spanish
Authors: Saab Andrés
Published: March 2014

This paper focuses on the morphosyntax of a kind of verbal duplication attested in River Plate Spanish (e.g. Vení acá, vení Lit: ‘come here come’). One striking property of this construction is that it requires that the duplicated verbs not be adjacent. I show that verbal duplication in River Plate Spanish instantiates a case of head copy realization and that the observed anti-adjacency effect reflects an underlying condition on non-pronunciation of heads in general. Some cases of head copy realization under apparent adjacency are independently accounted for once parts of words cannot be subject to morphological ellipsis.
Chapter 3. Discourse genres in the PUCV-2006 Academic and Professional
Corpus of Spanish
Authors: Parodi Giovanni , Ibáñez O. Romualdo , Venegas René
Published: March 2014

The identification and the classification of discourse genres have been one of the important concerns in linguistics studies. Particularly, since genres are analysed as complex objects and multi-dimensional approaches have been employed in order to capture their dynamic nature, more precise distinctive features have been determined. This chapter identifies, defines, classifies and exemplifies discourse genres emerging from the 491 texts forming the PUCV-2006 Academic and Professional Corpus of Spanish. In order to accomplish these objectives, we executed a complementary methodology of deductive and inductive nature. After analysing all the texts of the corpus, twenty-nine genres were identified and grouped. Interesting clusterings emerged reflecting cognitive, social, functional/communicative and linguistic variations.
Identifying aboutgrams in engineering texts
Authors: Warren Martin
Published: March 2014

This paper uses a new computer-mediated methodology, concgramming, to identify the aboutness of a text. Concgrams are the raw products of the concgramming process and consist of up to five co-occurring words irrespective of whether constituency variation (i.e. AB, A*B where * represents an intervening word) and/or positional variation (i.e. AB, BA) is present. Two engineering research articles are concgrammed to identify the most frequently occurring two-word lexical concgrams. The most frequent two-word lexical concgrams for each text are examined to determine whether the words simply co-occur or are meaningfully associated. Once this has been done, a provisional list of “aboutgrams” is drawn up which is tentatively taken to represent the aboutness of each text. These lists are then referred to a specialised corpus of engineering texts and then a general reference corpus. Those aboutgrams on the lists which are consistently more frequent in the text than in the two corpora are then put forward as representing the aboutness of the text. In the study, the lists of aboutgrams are compared with single word frequency lists to evaluate the advantages to be gained from determining aboutness by means of phraseology rather than key words. The conclusion is that aboutgrams are a better means for uncovering the aboutness of the texts.
Modal auxiliaries in second language varieties of English
Authors: Biewer Carolin
Published: March 2014

Although Sridhar and Sridhar pointed out as early as 1982 that the two linguistic fields of second language acquisition (SLA) and New English studies could benefit from each other, the gap between the two disciplines has never been closed. This article draws attention to some of the reasons why these two disciplines have not come together and discusses how SLA theory could be applied to New English studies to explain grammatical patterns found in many, if not all, L2 varieties of English. As a case study the usage of modals and semi-modals of obligation and necessity in various varieties of English as a second language (ESL) in Africa, Asia and the South Pacific will be considered. In this context it will also be discussed to what extent the (ENL)-ESL-EFL distinction of Kachru’s model is still suitable if we now include a learner’s perspective and focus on similarities between ESL and EFL (English as a foreign language). As differences in the usage of modal auxiliaries in different ESL varieties are mostly quantitative rather than categorical, a corpus linguistic approach was chosen.
English in Cyprus
Authors: Bongartz Christiane , Buschfeld Sarah
Published: March 2014

The postcolonial linguistic situation of the Mediterranean island of Cyprus has been widely neglected in research investigating the spread of English around the globe. This article seeks to remedy the lack of systematic investigation and places Cyprus English within the framework of World Englishes research. However, the linguistic reality is complex and heterogeneous, and Cyprus English can neither be assigned clear English as a Second Language (ESL) nor English as a Foreign Language (EFL) status. We illustrate what we came to see as a hybrid and complex situation drawing on data from a preliminary analysis of linguistic features attested in the CEDAR (Cyprus English Data Analysis and Research) corpus, and we link this analysis with findings from a sociolinguistic background analysis, a survey of language attitudes and of the use speakers make of English. To approach the question whether or not Cyprus English should be considered a second language variety, or whether it best be viewed as a kind of learner English, we suggest a way to map feature occurrence, possible structural nativization, and the influence of sociolinguistic variables to a matrix, the Variety Spectrum. Assuming hybrid ESL-EFL status for Cyprus English, we finally show that Kachru’s Three Circles model (Kachru 1985, 1992) does not account for such complex linguistic situations. We thus suggest the use of more flexible models for placing Cyprus English on the map of World Englishes (see Bruthiaux 2003).
Interrogative inversion as a learner phenomenon in English contact varieties
Authors: Hilbert Michaela
Published: March 2014

The phenomenon of the non-standard use of inversion in both main clause and embedded interrogatives has been mentioned for several varieties of English, as well as for individual second language acquisition (SLA). There have been varying explanations, however: embedded inversion has been attributed to either L1 influence from either Gaelic or conservative British English for Irish English (Filppula 2004); to a general learner phenomenon for Singapore English (Gupta 1994); to overgeneralization for individual SLA (McDavid & Card 1973); or its patterning has left authors short of any explanation at all (Bhatt 2004 for Indian English). In addition, it is one of the examples often quoted in the discussion of so-called “Angloversals” (term attributed to Mair 2003), i.e. phenomena occurring across a range of historically and geographically unrelated vernacular varieties of English (Kortmann & Szmrecsanyi 2004).This paper aims at questioning these divergent explanations of what looks like one and the same phenomenon, by analyzing the syntactic factors that govern the occurrence or non-occurrence of inversion in interrogative clauses in three varieties of English: Indian English (IndE), Singapore English (SingE) and Irish English (IrE). The paper will show that what looks similar is not necessarily the same phenomenon at all and will single out a factor that unites contact varieties of English and individual learner Englishes, a factor which has often been neglected in quantitative studies: the frequency of specific lexical chunks, or “formulaic language”.The data that provides the basis for the quantitative analysis is taken from the International Corpus of English (ICE), more precisely the spoken private conversations sections of its Indian and Singaporean subcorpora. The data for Irish English is taken from the Hamburg Corpus of Irish English (HCIE).
Doing historical linguistics using contemporary data
Authors: Andersen Øivin
Published: March 2014

Retrieving linguistic data from earlier stages of languages is a notoriously difficult task. Using large electronic corpora combined with data on frequency this task can to some extent be solved. In this article I focus on the use of token frequency as described in functional Grammaticalization Theory. Deverbal nouns are non-prototypical members of the noun class. As they get older they tend to develop into more prototypical nouns. In Grammaticalization Theory this process is called lexicalization. This was tested on some zero suffix nouns in the Norwegian newspaper corpus in 2004 using modern texts only. In this article I test these findings using older texts from the same corpus.