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Linguistics Vanguard

A Multimodal Journal for the Language Sciences

Editors-in-Chief: , und

Sprache: Englisch

Erstveröffentlichung: 20. Juni 2015

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Über diese Zeitschrift

Objective
Linguistics Vanguard is an outlet for high quality articles and innovative approaches in all major areas of linguistics. This journal is published solely online and provides an accessible platform for concise, cutting-edge research articles, overviews of the state of the art in particular areas of linguistics, as well as reports on novel methods and tools in the field. With its topical breadth of coverage and quick rate of production, it is a leading platform for scientific exchange in linguistics.

Topics
All topics within linguistics are welcome. The journal publishes general submissions as well as special collections. Proposals for special collections may be submitted to the editors for consideration (jlv@degruyterbrill.com).

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Innovative multimodal platform for disseminating scholarship
Concise research articles as well as overview articles
Quick turnaround time from submission to review and acceptance to publication
Covers all areas of linguistics, including interdisciplinary research

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Topicality and asymmetry between pronoun production and interpretation

7. Mai 2026

Heeju Hwang

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Despite much research on pronoun production and interpretation, whether the two processes are affected by the same preferences is controversial. The debate has primarily been limited to the question of whether pronoun production, like comprehension, is influenced by the likelihood of the speaker re-mentioning the referent, and the findings on this point are mixed. This study takes a new approach to the debate by reanalysing how topicality influences null and overt pronoun production and comprehension in Mandarin in two previous studies. The results show that the production of both pronoun types was influenced by grammatical role and/or topicality, whereas their interpretation was influenced by production and next-mention biases. These findings provide novel evidence for the production-interpretation asymmetry proposed in the Bayesian model of Kehler and colleagues, extending it to multiple pronoun types and to a typologically distinct language.
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Types of interpreter services at a border town hospital in Ghana: implications for linguistic rights and access to healthcare

27. April 2026

Sewoenam Chachu, Pamela Amoah, Mensimah Thompson Kwaffo

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A global priority captured by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 3 is universal access to quality, essential healthcare services. However, linguistic barriers have been found to be a cause of poor or unequal access to healthcare, especially for migrants for health purposes (MHPs). This paper presents types of interpreter in a border town health facility in Ghana and the implication for access to healthcare in the context of linguistic rights protection. Using data obtained from interviews with 13 health workers and one quasi-official interpreter, we show that communication in this health centre is mostly facilitated by ad hoc interpreters including relatives and friends, other patients, medical personnel, and a unique group called Ambulances who accompany patients to the hospital. We demonstrate how the use of ad hoc interpreters as supplementary inclusion measures facilitates access to healthcare and protects linguistic rights. We conclude the paper by advocating for training of trainers of medical interpreters, training of ad hoc interpreters for professionalization, and the development and implementation of regular workshops and systematic guidelines on multilingual communication. This paper adds to the discourse on language as a crucial determinant of healthcare access and a key factor in the attainment of sustainable development.
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Translation justice in crises: when lack of access to translation implies human rights violations

27. April 2026

Aline Larroyed

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In this article, I address the question of how lack of access to translation in crisis settings can imply violations of human rights. I examine key international human rights instruments, including declarations, covenants, academic literature, and legal cases, to understand how the lack of access or poor access to translation threatens human rights, by confronting the challenge of interpretation and implementation of international instruments in emblematic legal cases. In crisis situations ranging from climate change to armed conflicts and public health crises, effective translation should not be seen as a mere procedural measure but as a crucial means of protecting human rights. These rights include access to information, equality, healthcare, and education, the right to a fair trial, and, crucially, the right to life. The analysis indicates the importance of translation justice, emphasizing the need for adequate translation in crisis management to effectively protect human rights, calling for clearer legislative and policy approaches. It challenges us to break free from the confines of traditional rhetoric and embark on a journey of bold innovation in integrating translation into human rights frameworks and practices, with new paradigms of collaboration and inclusivity that challenge existing norms, disrupt entrenched power dynamics, and amplify marginalized voices.
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A semantic constraint on the variation in meanings of reduplicative constructions

27. April 2026

Greeshma Govindarajan, Prakash Mondal

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This paper proposes a semantic constraint that can account for the meaning variation that the phenomenon of reduplication expresses across languages. The constraint adopts a unified meaning representation that integrates formal and conceptual-cognitive aspects of linguistic meaning and this helps in understanding the relationship between the meanings of reduplicated forms and those of non-reduplicated forms. This makes way for a neutral and yet integrated formulation of the constraint at the crossroads between formal and cognitive approaches with respect to meaning representation. In order to show the efficacy of the constraint, several kinds of reduplicative constructions that are crosslinguistically attested are analyzed. Before the semantic constraint is proposed, an operational characterization of reduplication and a classification of reduplicative meanings adopted by the present paper are provided so that the constraint is equipped to handle different kinds of form-meaning correspondences that reduplicative meanings exhibit.
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Exploring Omani Arabic templatic patterns

27. April 2026

Khalsa Al Aghbari

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Omani Arabic exhibits distinctive morphological patterns that encode oppositions through a consonant–vowel (CV) template. The canonical base consists of three consonants, which are interspersed with vowels to mark morphological contrasts. This study investigates a range of original morphological patterns in Omani Arabic – an understudied variety of Arabic – and analyzes them within a word-based framework (Haspelmath, Martin. 2002. Understanding morphology . New York: Oxford University Press). Unlike traditional approaches to Arabic morphology, which typically rely on the classical faʕal pattern, the proposed analysis integrates CV templates into word schemas to account for the derivation of these unique patterns. This approach also offers broader insights into the mental lexicon, suggesting that lexical storage involves schemas rather than individual words, thereby efficiently encompassing extensive sets of templatic forms.
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Causal markers derived from discourse particles in Slavic and Baltic languages

27. April 2026

Natalia M. Zaika

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The paper analyzes causal markers derived from discourse particles in Old Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Polish, and Lithuanian. This path of secondary grammaticalization seems to be rare in the languages of the world and can be summarized as follows. First, discourse particles can eventually migrate within the clause towards the left edge of the clause typical for clausal markers, acquiring the properties of coordinate markers. Then, the markers under consideration can acquire some properties of subordinate markers. The properties analyzed in this paper include: the position of the causal clause, and the markers’ ability to occur in speech act contexts, to combine with contrastive particles or contrastive negation, to introduce answers to why -questions, and to be coordinated. It turns out that causal markers derived from discourse particles tend to behave as coordinate markers in speech act contexts, while in answers to why -questions they instead demonstrate subordinate properties. The degree of acquisition of subordinate properties varies for the markers analyzed in the paper. In this respect, Ukrainian bo and Polish bo seem to have acquired most of the properties of subordinate markers.
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Implications of learning models for linguistic theory: the richness of memory, the importance of loss, and the emergence of structure

27. April 2026

Vsevolod Kapatsinski, Gašper Beguš

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This paper introduces the special issue on implications of learning models, such as deep neural networks and instance-based models, for linguistic theory. This special issue aims to address the core question of linguistic theory – what makes human languages the way they are – by comparing models of language learning (i.e., different theories of the language acquisition device). We bring the papers together by discussing a number of recurrent themes: (i) the importance of rich memory, which enables extensive memorization without impairing generalization; (ii) our increasing understanding of the learning mechanisms that enable the emergence of structure from experience (Hebbian and error-driven); and (iii) the tasks that need to be solved for successful language learning. Limitations and future directions are highlighted.
Open Access
Exploring crosslinguistic and genre variation in syntactic complexity: insights from a multilingual parallel corpus

24. April 2026

Olga Nádvorníková, Jiří Milička, Alexandr Rosen

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Syntactic complexity varies not only between languages but also across textual genres, reflecting structural, stylistic, and communicative factors. This study explores the interplay of these two dimensions by analyzing six syntactic complexity metrics (SCMs) across 17 languages and four genres in a large multilingual corpus. We examine how SCMs correlate across languages and genres and assess which metrics best predict language versus genre. Correlation analysis reveals two robust metric clusters – clausal and phrasal. Inter-metric correlations are high in legal texts and movie subtitles, but substantially lower in parliamentary proceedings and fiction, likely due to greater internal variation in syntactic complexity within these genres. Using random forest classification, we show that SCMs strongly predict genre, with noun phrase metrics ranking highest. In contrast, mean dependency distance (mdd) and its standard deviation are most predictive of language. Misclassification tendencies confirm the affinity of English with Romance languages, previously observed in lexical studies. By emphasizing not only central tendencies (mean values) but also the dispersion of metrics within texts, this study adds methodological nuance to the measurement of syntactic complexity. It also confirms the need to account for both language and genre in crosslinguistic syntactic complexity research.
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A corpus-based sociolinguistic study of could you and would you in contemporary British English

23. April 2026

Ziwen Pan, Yike Yang

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Despite the significant role of politeness markers in managing interpersonal communication, relatively little attention has been paid to the modal forms could you and would you , particularly regarding their functional differences and sociolinguistic variation. This corpus-based study investigates these two politeness markers in contemporary British English using data from the Spoken British National Corpus 2014, a large collection of conversational British English across regions and social groups. Furthermore, the study examines how social variables (gender, age, and social class) influence the use of these expressions. The findings reveal significant functional differences between the two markers: could you is often used for checking possibilities, while would you is more commonly employed for making suggestions or offering something. Gender was found to have little impact on the use of could you , whereas would you was more frequently used by females. Age and social class also showed variation in the use of these markers, with younger speakers preferring could you for seeking information and middle-aged individuals using would you for making requests. This study contributes to the understanding of how politeness strategies vary across social contexts, offering new insights into how linguistic markers serve as tools for social negotiation and interpersonal communication.
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The dynamic interplay of metaphor and iconicity in Korean Sign Language

22. April 2026

Charmhun Jo

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This study explores a typological gap in sign language research by investigating how metaphor and iconicity interact in Korean Sign Language (KSL) using Taub’s (2012. Iconicity and metaphor. In Roland Pfau, Markus Steinbach & Bencie Woll (eds.), Sign language: An international handbook, 388–412. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter) double mapping model. Focusing on the verb [UNDERSTAND], the research illustrates how KSL integrates iconic and metaphoric elements simultaneously. The articulatory form iconically depicts tool-mediated penetration (source) while metaphorically framing understanding as mutual agreement (target) through the communication is sending schema. A comparison with ASL’s [THINK-PENETRATE] reveals that while the underlying conceptual metaphors are shared, their linguistic realizations are distinct. KSL’s bidirectional movement suggests a conceptualization framed by reciprocity and mutual confirmation, whereas ASL’s unidirectional thrust emphasizes individual cognitive breakthrough. The results suggest that double mapping operates as a crosslinguistic cognitive strategy for encoding abstract concepts, yet its realization may be culturally modulated. This paper advocates for frameworks that incorporate embodied cognition, modality affordances, and cultural context in sign language research, laying the groundwork for more extensive corpus-based and elicitation studies.
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Measuring the effects of language contact using word order entropy: the case of Nheengatu

20. April 2026

Diego Alves

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This study examines the potential influence of Portuguese on the development of Nheengatu, comparing it with Tupinambá, the language from which Nheengatu originated. By applying word order entropy measures across 24 syntactic features, we analyze word order flexibility and identify cases suggesting direct Portuguese influence. The results show that Nheengatu aligns more closely with Portuguese in several word order features, including the positioning of subjects, objects, and the root. Additionally, Nheengatu is more aligned with Portuguese word order in the placement of adjectival modifiers relative to nouns and adverbs modifying adjectives. The influence of Portuguese is also evident in the positioning of auxiliary verbs, copulas, and markers (i.e., words marking clause subordination). Regarding clause positions, Nheengatu aligns with Portuguese, particularly in the placement of clauses that serve as the subject or object of the verb. This research suggests that entropy measures, supported by examples from corpora, can be useful for exploring potential language contact influences. However, limitations such as data size, annotation inconsistencies, and the non-native authorship of Tupinambá texts introduce potential biases.
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Regional and ethnic differences in morphosyntactic variation among black high school students in two US cities

17. April 2026

Sabriya Fisher

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This paper presents a study of regional and ethnic variation in the use of morphosyntactic features associated with African American English (AAE) among 35 Black high school students in Philadelphia and Boston. Twenty-five morphosyntactic features are examined by three measures of use: range of features, dialect density measure, and copula deletion rates. Results demonstrate marked differences in the use of AAE morphosyntax between cities, with Philadelphia speakers showing wider ranges, higher dialect density measures, and higher rates of copula deletion. Within ethnically diverse Boston, speakers with Afro-Latinx ancestry have the most restricted use of AAE features. This work represents the first description of AAE morphosyntax in Boston, and contributes to the study of diversity both within and between Black communities.
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Technology and language: a dual challenge in crisis communication

16. April 2026

Jiexiu Liu

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This study investigates crisis communication challenges faced by non-Mandarin-speaking foreigners, a linguistic minority in China, during the 2022 outbreak of the Omicron variant of COVID-19. Employing a mixed-methods approach, it analyses 1,521 instant messages translated by WeChat’s built-in machine translation system, questionnaire data from 430 expatriates representing diverse nationalities living in 27 Chinese cities, and interviews with 12 participants. Grounded in crisis communication theory, the study examines machine translation errors, device-related factors enhancing or hindering message reception, and cultural factors regarding messaging content and timing. The findings reveal that machine translation fluency and adequacy errors, coupled with device barriers such as unreliable internet, impeded effective communication, while cultural mismatches exacerbated confusion. The study proposes culturally sensitive machine translation systems and robust digital infrastructure to enhance linguistic equity, aligning with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 3, 10, and 16. It also offers crisis managers practical strategies for inclusive technology-driven communication.
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Navigating multilingual resources in healthcare: evidence from the Greater Bay Area of China

14. April 2026

Sisi Wang, Jinghui Si

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In health communication, access to language is essential during emergencies and crises. The Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA), a region of superdiverse multilingualism through increasing migrant flows, features the coexistence of languages (e.g., Chinese, English, and Portuguese) and dialects (e.g., Cantonese, Hakka, and Min). This research studies how multilingual resources are represented and how multilingual communication is practiced. It examines physical representations evidenced in the linguistic landscape of hospitals in the GBA, drawing on 460 real-world signs, while investigating 10 practitioners’ experience via in-depth interviews. The multilingual landscape, although an essential marker of multilingual awareness and professional identity, exhibits inequivalence in information load and mistranslations, which overshadow the functional meanings of multilingual signs. These function more as cultural tokens and do not prioritize accuracy. Four factors shape multilingual communication: (1) accessibility to professional interpreters, (2) cultural and cognitive gaps, (3) technology-enhanced practice, and (4) ethical considerations. Comparative analysis of the physical and practical dimensions of multilingual communication reveals a disjunction between symbolic inclusion and communicative functionality, institutional and ethical paradoxes, and the stratification of languages and linguistic justice. We consider performative, unregulated, and hierarchical multilingualism to shed light on a more critical understanding of multilingual healthcare communication.
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Crisis managers, the disaster risk reduction agenda, and the human right to information: a case study of building translation capacity in Sierra Leone

13. April 2026

Pious Mannah, Jonas Knauerhase, Chloe Franklin, Shaun Pickering

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The multilingual population in Sierra Leone witnessed the devastating effects of linguistically and culturally inappropriate risk communication during the 2014 Ebola epidemic, when many residents coud not access critical information in a language they understood, contravening the 1948 UN Charter of Human Rights. The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) terminology aims to support global disaster risk reduction efforts, yet its availability in only six official UN languages limits accessibility. To strengthen Sierra Leone’s translation capacity and crisis preparedness, YMCA Sierra Leone and University College London launched a crisis translation training project in 2020. Crisis professionals translated the UNDRR terminology into Kono, Krio, Limba, Mende, and Themne, producing a multilingual disaster risk reduction resource. This paper examines the interactional dynamics among the project’s sponsors, participants, and the language experts that supported the quality assurance procedures. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders recruited through snowball sampling, we present preliminary findings. Results highlight the importance of framing language protection as a right-based approach to prevent discrimination and past failures. Recommended measures include formalizing translation and interpreting policies in crisis management, integrating multilingual training, expanding access to multilingual disaster risk reduction materials, and leveraging technology for real-time interpreting.
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Translanguaging for civic education: translations emerging from Kenya’s #RejectFinanceBill2024 protests

3. April 2026

Rachel Muchira

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The #RejectFinanceBill2024 protests in Kenya started as an online movement, as people voiced their dissatisfaction with not only the content of the finance bill but also general misgovernance. As the demonstrations escalated leading up to the parliamentary vote on the bill, content creators on Twitter (X) called on Kenyans to share videos translating the key contentious issues in the bill into as many Kenyan languages as possible, to educate Kenyans on the necessity of the protests. Kenyans responded by sending in videos explaining the bill in varieties of Gikuyu, Ekegusii, Dholuo, and so on, and even in Kenyan Sign Language. The call was in recognition of and a reaction to the exclusion resulting from crucial government documents being available only in English, and in response Kenyans employed translanguaging to mobilize linguistic and non-linguistic resources to deconstruct the bill, with the outcome being textual, graphical, musical, and corporeal translations that enhanced civic education, in turn fuelling the protests and culminated in the president withdrawing the bill. This paper investigates translanguaging in the creation of translations, not just to facilitate inclusion and linguistic justice, but as facilitation for civic education to create the awareness needed to push for fair, just, and equitable governance.
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Cognitive constraints on type polymorphism in the language of science

20. März 2026

Giosuè Baggio

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The language of science, in particular scientific English, has been investigated in analytic philosophy and applied linguistics, but a cognitive science perspective is still missing. Scientific languages might differ from everyday language in ways that have consequences for ease of processing and learnability, and conversely cognitive considerations may be useful to explain properties of scientific languages. Here, I argue that cognition constrains the variety of argument types that some expressions in the language of science can accept (type polymorphism), keeping processing difficulty in check. I examine some implications of this hypothesis for complement coercion with aspectual verbs, propositional attitude verbs, generalized coordination, and concealed questions. I present the results of a corpus study on type polymorphism for aspectual verbs in biomedical language, corroborating the main hypothesis. Finally, I consider the feasibility of a research program on the cognitive science of scientific language.
Open Access
Climate risk communication in areas with extreme weather: the case of Qatar

19. März 2026

Maria Jimenez-Andres

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This paper presents a case study investigating how climate-related health risks are communicated in Qatar through news media and government messaging, with a particular focus on migrant workers. It assesses the accessibility of media coverage and public communication strategies, as well as their alignment with international guidelines for inclusive risk communication. The study analyses existing online climate communication messages, channels, and resources, both prior to and during emergency situations. Accessibility is understood as the extent to which information is retrievable, comprehensible, and usable by people with a wide range of abilities. This includes physical, digital, linguistic, and social dimensions of access. By examining Qatar’s approach to climate risk communication in a multilingual and socioeconomically diverse context, the study highlights existing challenges and offers insights for improving the inclusivity and effectiveness of public communication in similar settings. Findings highlight key gaps and structural barriers in current practices, offering insights for the development of more equitable and inclusive public communication strategies in climate-vulnerable settings such as Qatar.
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From recursion to incrementality: return to recurrent neural networks

16. März 2026

Cristiano Chesi, Matilde Barbini, Veronica Bressan, Achille Fusco, Sofia Neri, Maria Letizia Piccini Bianchessi, Sarah Rossi, Tommaso Sgrizzi

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Large language models grounded on attention-based architectures have outperformed recurrent neural networks (RNNs), like those based on long short-term memory (LSTM) gating systems, in various natural language processing tasks. However, despite optimization, these models (i) require unreasonable training data compared to what children need, (ii) exhibit an inverse relationship between their performance and their linguistic explanatory value, and, crucially, (iii) avoid reasonable (word-by-word) incremental sentence processing, raising doubts about their cognitive plausibility. In this paper, we address these issues starting from the intuition that RNNs directly model incrementality, a key factor in human language processing. Specifically, we discuss the performance of an RNN architecture, eMG-RNN, both during training and in minimal pairs forced-choice tasks in English and Italian. We observe that: (i) ecological training regimens lead to a decrease in cross-entropy loss, although performance on linguistic minimal pairs does not improve; (ii) the specific gating system adopted induces relevant structural biases; and (iii) while these networks outperform standard LSTM, gated recurrent unit (GRU) networks, and transformer models under the same ecological training regimens, their performance on linguistic tasks remains low compared to adults (in English) and 7-year-old children (in Italian).
Open Access
Language hierarchies and community resilience: sociolinguistic analysis of multilingual disaster communication in rural Malawi

12. März 2026

Marija Todorova, Stuart Mwale, Rachel Liu

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This article examines the role of language in enhancing disaster resilience for cyclone-affected communities in rural Malawi. It focuses on the linguistic challenges faced in humanitarian aid efforts in a multilingual context, where English dominates institutional communication, and Chichewa is largely used for community outreach, despite most affected communities primarily speaking local minority languages such as Chiyao. Drawing on surveys conducted with NGO staff and affected populations, the study analyses patterns of language use, formal and informal translation practices, and technological communication methods. The findings reveal significant gaps in professional translation services, reliance on bilingual community members operating informally, and limited use of translation technologies. The absence of formal translation frameworks often results in barriers to communication, particularly with marginalized populations, including women and illiterate citizens. The article highlights the need for structured translation approaches, utilizing multilingual community members, culture- and gender-sensitive communication, and the integration of technology to ensure equitable access to disaster information with the aim of strengthening resilience and inclusivity in humanitarian responses.
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Understanding translanguaging creativity on Chinese Weibo: the example of pseudo-Chinese phenomenon

11. März 2026

Yi Liu

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Pseudo-Chinese, an emergent online language phenomenon blending Chinese, Japanese, emojis, and emoticons, is examined in this study through a translanguaging lens on Weibo. By collecting and analyzing three threads related to pseudo-Chinese on Weibo, this study employs Jaworska’s digital code plays framework for qualitative analysis, and examines the original posts and their associated comments. The analysis reveals that users exhibit critical metalinguistic awareness and creativity in manipulating linguistic resources, such as simplified and traditional hanzi, homographs, romaji, and trans-scripting, to transcend conventional language boundaries. Users co-construct a translanguaging space through discursive play, demonstrating affirmative engagement with hybrid language practices. This research extends Chinese translanguaging research beyond English-Chinese contexts and illuminates creativity in Japanese-Chinese digital communication.
Open Access
The synergy of linguistic theories and models of learning

9. März 2026

Dagmar Divjak, Petar Milin

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Emergence is a key concept in usage-based linguistic theories, which view natural languages as complex systems learned through exposure to usage, by relying on general cognitive functions rather than an innate language faculty and its underlying universal grammar posited by generativist theories. Despite its importance, however, the emergence of language knowledge has often been treated axiomatically rather than being empirically substantiated. We argue that learning, understood as a gradual change in knowledge, can serve as an operational definition of emergence of knowledge through usage. Integrating usage-based linguistics with the psychology of learning creates a productive synergy. For linguistics, a focus on learning processes constrains theoretical abstractions to those learnable from data. For psychology, language provides a unique and challenging testbed for understanding real-world learning mechanisms. We illustrate these points with case studies on the tense-aspect systems of English and Polish, shedding new light on the role of imperfect contingencies in shaping linguistic patterns while testing psychological models of learning.
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(R)NNs too expressive?

9. März 2026

Jane Li, Alan Zhou

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This work investigates why recurrent neural networks (RNNs) tend to learn phonological patterns that are unattested or dispreferred by humans. Specifically, we explore the hypothesis that their over-generation is caused by their excess expressive capacity – they are beyond the limited complexity class that contains the set of attested phonological patterns. We compared these over-expressive RNNs against the weaker convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on a battery of string recognition tasks. We find that the expressivity of a model’s architecture does not predict the string classes that it excels at recognizing. Instead, we suggest that CNNs’ position-invariant biases better explain their successes in our experiment.
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The role of narrative time in legal storytelling: a comparative analysis of opening statements in the Grant and Amanda Hayes trials

2. März 2026

Kirsty E. Blewitt, Sarah E. Duffy

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Opening statements in criminal trials serve as a crucial stage in which attorneys present competing accounts of events and establish narrative frameworks that shape how jurors interpret the case. This article develops a linguistic framework for analysing temporal structuring in courtroom storytelling, applying Ricœur’s theory of narrative time to the study of legal argumentation. Focusing on the separate North Carolina murder trials of Grant and Amanda Hayes (2013–2014), the analysis compares how the prosecution and defence use episodic (chronological) and configurational (integrative) dimensions of narrative to construct agency, intent, and culpability. The findings show that the prosecution builds a coherent, linear sequence emphasizing planning and shared motive, whereas the defence fragments the temporal order to introduce ambiguity and redistribute blame. By showing how attorneys’ temporal organization functions as a persuasive resource, the study advances understanding of narrative time in courtroom storytelling and offers broader insights into discursive, conversational, and argumentative practice both within legal contexts and beyond.
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Pseudoscience: epistemic management, cultural mimicry, and virtue epistemology

16. Februar 2026

Alexandra Regina Kratschmer

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The epistemic strategies of a set of peer-reviewed articles on homeopathy and psychoanalysis are examined from the perspectives of virtue epistemology and cultural mimicry to explore the aptitude of these two science-theoretical notions as tools for diagnosing pseudoscientific behavior. Cultural mimicry, according to Boudry, is the hallmark of pseudoscience: it is the pretense of epistemic warrant through spurious evidence and avoiding counterevidence. In the text sample, inadequate epistemic strategies like the use of undefined technical terminology, unwarranted claims, and conjectural argumentation can be observed, but it seems difficult to classify these behaviors as clearly pseudoscientific rather than merely careless. More research into objective measures for epistemic behavior is needed. Ultimately, it might only be possible to decide on the pseudoscientific status of a theory or a discipline by longitudinal scrutiny. From the perspective of virtue epistemology, the mapped flaws in epistemic management could point to vices like dishonesty, epistemic arrogance, and lack of epistemic integrity in out-group communication (most homeopathy articles), and closed-mindedness or intellectual gullibility in in-group communication (most psychoanalysis articles). However, due to the direction of inference, virtue epistemology seems less apt to serve as a diagnostic tool for concrete epistemic behavior.
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“The facts speak for themselves”: dismantling conspiracy theories as disinformation

12. Februar 2026

Rui Sousa-Silva

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Disinformation has been commonly approached as fake news, i.e., news that does not comply with the principles of factuality, objectivity, and neutrality. However, not all pieces of disinformation are damaging (e.g., satire) or rely on lack of factuality. Rather, it is the combination of lack of factuality and intention to deceive that embodies the most serious form of disinformation. By taking advantage of echo chambers and filter bubbles, disinformers use distorted facts to disseminate alternative forms of disinformation and manipulate readers’ views. This article discusses the relevance of establishing a sociolect of conspiracy theories (CTs) as alternative sources of disinformation. It builds on a small corpus of CTs published in Portuguese to explore the use of forensic linguistics methods to assist the detection of disinformation. A holistic linguistics approach is adopted, which operates by scrutinizing metadata, structure, and discourse to identify which linguistic features depart from mainstream sources and which ones overlap, and thus understanding the linguistic materializations of CTs. The findings reveal promising results in detecting CTs as alternative sources of disinformation, with the additional advantage of substantiating judgements of disinformation with linguistic evidence. This article concludes with a discussion of the limitations of this exploratory research.
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The researcher’s bias in fake news automatic detection: a case study

4. Februar 2026

Stefania M. Maci, Simone Abbiati

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This study examines the challenges involved in automatically identifying disinformation about abortion on Twitter. We collected 166,180 tweets posted on X (January–December 2022) about the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade to train large language models (LLMs) and machine learning systems to recognize disinformation about abortion. For this purpose, we created a pilot corpus of 8,309 tweets. Surprisingly, only 0.08 % of the pilot corpus contained medical disinformation. We thus questioned whether the planned machine learning could be carried out, given that semantic ambiguity regarding what is fake in the abortion debate poses significant hurdles. We observed that tweets expressing extreme viewpoints were often labelled as “fake”, highlighting the subjective nature of such categorizations. These findings, strongly influenced by personal ideological views on the topic in question, emphasize the complexity of using LLMs and machine learning systems to navigate emotionally charged topics. They also emphasize the importance of considering different perspectives to reduce bias in analyses, advise caution against relying solely on these technologies, and warn of the problems of potential bias and “cherry-picking” in data interpretation, especially when researching social media debates which are full of implicit content, presuppositions, and implicatures, as well as fallacious argumentation.
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Gesture-speech construction from a Cognitive Grammar perspective: the case of the sweeping away gesture

4. Februar 2026

Han Yang, Guiying Jiang

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This study examines the polysemy of the sweeping away gesture and its integration with speech using a Cognitive Grammar framework. While previous research has documented the embodied origins and multiple senses of this kind of gesture, two gaps remain: a unified model of its cognitive mechanisms and a detailed Cognitive Grammar analysis of its symbolic integration patterns. Analyzing instances from debates, we identify three multimodal constructions: Extension, Completion, and Negation. We demonstrate that the semantic expansion across these constructions is not arbitrary but motivated by specific cognitive operations: the shift from Extension to Completion constructions stems from trajector prominence shifts within the same profiled relationship, while Negation emerges through metaphorical mapping. Furthermore, each construction exhibits distinct integration patterns: elaboration (Extension), extension (Completion), and complementation (Negation). By detailing these specific form-meaning pairings, this study demonstrates Cognitive Grammar’s robust capacity for modeling gestural polysemy within a unified framework. The analysis further reveals a functional continuum from compositional to pragmatic uses, motivating the development of more dynamic analytical models. Ultimately, by explaining the systematic cognitive mechanisms of gesture-speech integration, this work advances a granular understanding of language as an embodied, multimodal phenomenon.
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Phonotactic conditions of geminates can influence sound symbolic effects: cuteness and evilness judgement experiments for Japanese speakers

4. Februar 2026

Gakuji Kumagai

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This study explores the sound symbolic effects of geminate consonants. I propose three working hypotheses: (1) geminates convey a particular meaning more strongly than singletons, (2) geminates convey it to the same extent as singletons, and (3) geminates convey it less strongly than singletons. To evaluate the most plausible hypothesis, I conducted experiments in which Japanese speakers judged the cuteness and the evilness of nonce words using a four-point scale. The results indicate that, on the one hand, the low-frequency geminate /ɾɾ/ in Japanese conveys cuteness less strongly than its singleton counterpart. On the other hand, the low-frequency geminate /bb/ conveys evilness to the same extent as its corresponding singleton. In conclusion, this study suggests that both the second and third hypotheses are plausible. Further research is needed to determine whether these findings extend to other sound symbolic associations across languages.
Open Access
The effects of bidialectalism on cognitive functioning among young and midlife adults in Austria

28. Januar 2026

Mason A. Wirtz, Evelyn Roth, Erik Schleef

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One of the most widely debated topics in bilingualism research pertains to the issue of the “bilingual advantage”, that is the idea that regular use of multiple languages can enhance cognitive abilities. A related notion is that control of two typologically very close languages such as a vernacular and standard language variety (i.e., bidialectalism) may foster cognitive control abilities due to the ubiquitous everyday usage of both varieties. We set out to investigate to what extent varying usage of and proficiency in standard German and the Austro-Bavarian vernacular correlate with three measures of cognitive functioning, namely working memory, divided attention, and alertness, among 39 young and midlife adults (aged 21–64). We found that, controlling for sociodemographic features, Austro-Bavarian-dominant bidialectals demonstrated superior performance on the working memory task, but not on the alertness or divided attention tasks. These findings shed new light on the effects of bidialectalism on cognitive functioning in adulthood.
Open Access
The negative existential cycle in Turkish Sign Language (TİD)

28. Januar 2026

Bahtiyar Makaroğlu

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The evolution of negation is typically characterized as a cyclical process, whereby new constructions emerge to encode existing functions. The current corpus-based study undertakes an investigation into the evolution of the negative existential negator yok ‘non.exist’ in Turkish Sign Language (TİD). It seeks to investigate the applicability of the negative existential cycle as proposed by Croft (1991) and examines its potential as an explanatory framework in understanding the sources and pathways of standard negation. Here it is evidenced that this cycle occurs within a specific language and TİD presents aspects of stage B ∼ C: the existential negator yok gradually substitutes for the verbal negator deĞİl in specific contexts of the grammatical system. The present analysis offers a novel perspective on the comprehensive structure of the TİD negation system. This perspective posits that the existential negator yok does not merely signify the negation of existence; rather, it also functions as a standard negator. The determination is substantiated by the negative existential cycle, establishes a framework for understanding the relationship between existential negation and standard negation.
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Social expectations modulate vowel perception in Korean dialect convergence

28. Januar 2026

Hwanmin Jung, Grace E. Oh, Jeong-Im Han

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This study investigates how social expectations influence the perception of phonetic convergence in dialectal speech. Using an AXB discrimination task, we tested whether Seoul Korean listeners could detect convergence in North Korean speakers’ vowel productions, and whether this perception was modulated by explicit information about speaker identity. Four vowels (/ɛ/, /ɨ/, /o/, /ʌ/) were selected based on their dialectal salience. In Experiment 1, listeners judged similarity without knowing the speaker’s identity. In Experiment 2, listeners were told the speaker was North Korean. Results showed that convergence was generally perceptible, with /ʌ/ yielding the highest accuracy. However, when dialectal identity was made explicit, perceptual accuracy declined for /o/ and /ʌ/, suggesting that strong top-down expectations hindered categorization of acoustically ambiguous tokens. In contrast, accuracy for /ɛ/ and /ɨ/ marginally improved, consistent with their more flexible phonological status across dialects. These findings support socially enriched models of speech perception, showing that listeners use internalized, socially indexed phonological templates that shape convergence detection. Social cues enhance perception when they align with acoustic input, but disrupt it when expectations override the signal. This study demonstrates the category-specific and dialect-sensitive nature of expectation-driven perception in socially marked speech.
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Bilinguals show reduced sensitivity to audience-related considerations in language production: corpus evidence from Mandarin referring expressions

28. Januar 2026

Yue Zou, Yike Yang

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It has long been argued that speakers’ choices of linguistic forms during production are influenced by the functional pressures of efficiency and ambiguity avoidance. A reduced form is often easier to produce but can potentially cause ambiguity. Examining bilinguals’ choices between the full and reduced forms can provide valuable insights into how the pressures compete with each other. In the present study, we explore the alternating use of full and reduced forms of Mandarin referring expressions through a multi-factorial analysis on three groups of Mandarin speakers (Cantonese-Mandarin bilinguals, Mandarin-Cantonese bilinguals, and Mandarin monolinguals) to determine whether bilinguals with lower language proficiency can coordinate between production constraints and audience-related considerations. The findings revealed that all three groups of speakers show tendencies of saving effort and avoiding ambiguity in their production of referring expressions. However, bilinguals demonstrated an overuse of reduced forms, which indicates that they are less sensitive to audience-related considerations in language production.
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Diachrony of biclausal causal constructions in Gban

23. Januar 2026

Maksim Fedotov

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The paper presents an internal diachronic reconstruction for a certain type of marking found in causal clauses in Gban. Gban has a set of biclausal causal constructions built on the basis of two elements, clause-initial nɛ̰̀… and clause-final …lɛ̌ (cognate with the postposition lɛ̌ ‘because of’ and the noun lɛ̌ ‘matter’). One of these varieties contains both elements, resulting in a frame-like marking “[[ nɛ̰̀ cause lɛ̌ ], consequence ]”, the other two contain only one element: “[[ nɛ̰̀ cause ], consequence ]” and “[[ cause lɛ̌ ], consequence ]”. There is also a consequence construction, again involving a cognate element lɛ̌… , this time clause-initial and meaning ‘therefore’: “[ cause ], [ lɛ̌ consequence ]”, and a set of correlative cause-and-consequence constructions: “[( nɛ̰̀ ) cause ( lɛ̌ )], [ lɛ̌ consequence ]”. Several diachronic scenarios for the emergence of these constructions are discussed. The most plausible scenario states that the element lɛ̌ in all constructions comes from a contraction of a longer (and still attested) unit ȁ lì lɛ̌ , literally ‘it’s because of that ’, and that in the causal constructions, this ( ȁ lì ) lɛ̌ unit appeared via reanalysis from either its medial uses in correlative structures and the consequence construction or from its possible final use, similar to He fell because the floor was slippery, that’s why .
Open Access
When vowels glottalize without strictly aligning with prosodic boundaries: marking prosodic structure in American and Australian English

23. Januar 2026

Jiyoung Jang, Sahyang Kim, Anne Cutler, Taehong Cho

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Vowel glottalization, as voice quality variation, occurs at phrase edges or under prominence, often in conjunction with resolving onsetless syllables or vowel-vowel hiatus. This study examines whether and how voice quality in two varieties of English, American and Australian, is manifested at phrase edges and under prominence in vowels that are neither strictly initial nor final. Analyses of spectral and noise measures show that both varieties utilize voice quality to signal prominence and boundaries, even in non-edge contexts. Specifically, increased glottalization reflects stronger laryngeal articulation in line with domain-initial and prominence-induced strengthening. Conversely, phrase-final positions are characterized by phrase-final creak, which is often observed with phrase-final weakening. While both varieties show similar vowel glottalization usage, Australian English tends to use voice quality more extensively to mark focus than American English, with a greater overall tendency toward glottalization. This suggests that the impressionistic difference perceived in the general use of voice quality between the varieties (more robust glottalized vowels in Australian English) stems from differences in the use of glottalization in marking prosodic structure. These findings underscore the role of non-contrastive voice quality in shaping prosodic structure across varieties while also revealing dialect-specific interactions between phonetics and prosody in its manifestation.
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Estimating the location and degree of constriction and labial aperture in emphatics in Jordanian Arabic

19. Januar 2026

Bilal Alsharif

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Arabic dialects are often anecdotally described as existing on a continuum of guttural quality, driven by varying degrees of pharyngeal constriction. To empirically assess this, we collected phonetic data from two Jordanian dialects: rural and urban. We employ acoustic analysis and various metrics to quantify the upper and lower vocal tracts’ contribution to the production of emphatic sounds. Our analysis specifically aims to estimate the degree and location of articulatory constriction of emphatics in these dialects, and to identify the role of lip aperture in their production. We analyze vowel formants using generalized additive mixed models. Subsequently, we perform an articulatory estimation using the first two formants and their amplitudes to describe the labial posture and overall vocal tract configuration in emphatics. Our findings reveal that the rural dialect exhibits a more pronounced guttural quality, characterized by laryngopharyngeal constriction. In contrast, the urban dialect primarily shows upper pharyngeal (dorsal) constriction. Furthermore, the study reveals a causal relationship between lip protrusion and the degree and location of articulatory constriction of emphatics within the vocal tract.
Open Access
How the cause and purpose syncretism was lost: the tale of two Russian subordinators

20. November 2025

Sergey Say

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In early nineteenth-century Russian, two complex subordinators – dlja togo, čto(by) and zatem, čto(by) – exhibited syncretism between cause and purpose. Over the course of the century, this syncretism was lost: while the purpose uses remained frequent, the causal uses largely decayed by the end of the nineteenth century. Based on quantitative corpus data, I trace this shift over the course of the nineteenth century. I argue that the two interpretations were weakly differentiated at the beginning of the century, but gradually became firmly tied with a mood distinction. Eventually, the subjunctive purpose construction, which involves čtoby , remained robust, while its indicative causal counterpart, which involves čto , went out of use. This divergence is explained by the paradigmatic associations with related constructions: notably, the preposition dlja lost its causal meaning, contributing to the decline of dlja togo, čto ; and the interrogative purpose adverbial začem contributed to the retention of the purpose subordinator based on zatem . Finally, the default simplex purpose subordinator čtoby reinforced the complex purpose constructions containing čtoby , especially in focused contexts.
Open Access
Is deeper always better? Replacing linear mappings with deep learning networks in the Discriminative Lexicon Model

13. November 2025

Maria Heitmeier, Valeria Schmidt, Hendrik P.A. Lensch, R. Harald Baayen

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Recently, deep learning models have increasingly been used in cognitive modelling of language. This study asks whether deep learning can help us to better understand the learning problem that needs to be solved by speakers, above and beyond linear methods. We utilize the Discriminative Lexicon Model introduced by Baayen and colleagues, which models comprehension and production with mappings between numeric form and meaning vectors. While so far, these mappings have been linear (linear discriminative learning; LDL), in the present study we replace them with deep dense neural networks (deep discriminative learning; DDL). We find that DDL affords more accurate mappings for large and diverse datasets from English and Dutch, but not necessarily for Estonian and Taiwan Mandarin. DDL outperforms LDL in particular for words with pseudo-morphological structure such as chol + er . Applied to average reaction times, we find that DDL is outperformed by frequency-informed linear mappings (FIL). However, DDL trained in a frequency-informed way (“frequency-informed” deep learning; FIDDL) substantially outperforms FIL. Finally, while linear mappings can very effectively be updated from trial-to-trial to model incremental lexical learning, deep mappings cannot do so as effectively. At present, both linear and deep mappings are informative for understanding language.
Open Access
Lies in the lexicon: a corpus-based exploration of lexicon in truthful and deceitful narrative accounts

5. November 2025

Victoria Johansson, Kajsa Gullberg, Roger Johansson

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Corpus linguistic studies have shown that lexicon varies according to linguistic register, and cognitive studies have demonstrated that lexical aspects play a significant role in determining the veracity of people’s accounts. Both lines of research underpin the present study, where the aim is to explore how overall lexical properties (lexical density and lexical diversity, and noun, verb, and adjective density) are related to the veracity of narratives. We make use of a corpus of 576 spoken and written narratives, especially collected with the purpose of investigating linguistic properties in truthful and deceitful accounts. Data were collected in an experiment involving 36 participants who viewed four elicitation films depicting minor misdemeanors, and subsequently recounted the events in both written and spoken formats, resulting in four narrative accounts (two truthful and two deceitful, in which they were asked to alter a critical event regarding “who did it”). The results reveal some significant differences in how verb, noun, and adjective density relate to veracity, but the results are inconclusive. A cautious interpretation is that narrators make use of different lexical strategies depending on veracity but that elicitation material may strongly influence the effects, stressing the difficulties in characterizing deceptive written texts.
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Engaging to deceive: strategies of synthetic involvement in fake tweets

23. Oktober 2025

Sylvia Jaworska

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This study investigates the lexico-grammatical and graphemic features of synthetic involvement employed by fake news writers to engage audiences on Twitter (now X). Conceptually, it draws on the linguistic notion of involvement as a form of phatic communication but extends it to include features of digital discourse produced with the intent to manipulate and deceive – hence, synthetic involvement. Methodologically, the study adopts a comparative corpus-based approach to identify features of involvement in a dataset of 13,000 tweets produced by fake accounts operated by the Russian Internet Research Agency. In addition to language markers such as the frequent use of proper nouns, third person present tense reporting verbs associated with standard English, interjections, and personal and possessive pronouns, the study also identifies graphemic features that reflect deliberate attempts to fabricate authenticity, for example, the use of asterisks for inconsistent self-censorship to obscure offensive language. By revealing this wider range of features, the study contributes to the growing body of linguistic research on online disinformation, offering insight into how synthetic involvement is strategically constructed and deployed to deceive and manipulate public opinion.
Open Access
From neural matter to rapid symbolic learning in brains and artificial neural networks: a brief overview and perspective

21. Oktober 2025

Rosario Tomasello

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Advances in artificial neural networks (ANNs) have revolutionized the way we work, learn, and acquire information, achieving human-level capabilities. Yet, ANNs differ fundamentally from the human brain in how symbolic knowledge is acquired, typically requiring extensive training to form stable internal representations. In contrast, the human brain exhibits exceptional ability to instantaneously map new words to their referents, a process known as “fast mapping”, considered a fundamental mechanism underlying symbol acquisition in early ontogeny. This review provides an overview of neurocognitive research on rapid symbolic learning and examines recent advances in computational modeling approaches aimed at replicating this capability. Models constrained by neurobiological principles known to exist in the human brain are discussed, providing a first step toward neural- and cortical-level explanations of rapid symbolic learning and opening new venues for identifying the neural mechanisms underpinning rapid word acquisition. Archiving these advances may be particularly relevant for guiding the development of sustainable, energy-efficient architectures. A major desideratum from a linguistic and pragmatic perspective involves investigating the neural basis of fast mapping across diverse communicative and pragmatic contexts, an area where current models still fall short.
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Linguistic approaches to fake news research are growing and maturing: commentary on a special issue

13. Oktober 2025

Maite Taboada

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This first special issue of Linguistics Vanguard on the language of fake news offers multiple perspectives on the linguistic analysis of fake news and misinformation, with a range of approaches and methodologies, showing the sophistication and maturity of the field. The study of fake news is a flourishing area of research, with contributions from communication, media studies, data science, and natural language processing. The growing body of research in linguistics contributes careful qualitative analyses of the social context of production and interpretation of misinformation, coupled with well-documented techniques from corpus linguistics. This commentary provides a short retrospective of linguistic approaches to fake news and highlights the contributions from the papers in the issue.
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Reintroducing and testing the Probabilistic Sliding Template Model of vowel perception

29. September 2025

Santiago Barreda, T. Florian Jaeger

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Normalization of the speech signal onto comparatively invariant phonetic representations is critical to speech perception. Assumptions about this process also play a central role in phonetics and phonology. Yet, despite the importance of these assumptions, popular normalization accounts continue to incorrectly assume that the relevant normalization parameters are “known” – for example, because the researcher can estimate them from a fully balanced set of recordings. Listeners, however, have to incrementally infer these parameters from the speech input. We reintroduce a seminal, but still underappreciated, model of this inference process – the Probabilistic Sliding Template Model of vowel normalization and perception (PSTM) – and show why researchers cannot afford to ignore it. We provide the R package STM, which makes it trivial to apply the PSTM to new data. We present the first quantitative assessment of the PSTM against human perception. We show that the model excels at predicting listeners’ vowel categorization behavior, clearly outperforming the popular Lobanov normalization.
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Learning and generalizing stress patterns with a sequence-to-sequence neural network

26. September 2025

Brandon Prickett, Joe Pater

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We present the first application of modern neural networks to the well-studied task of learning word stress systems. We tested our adaptation of a sequence-to-sequence network on the Tesar and Smolensky (2000. Learnability in optimality theory . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) test set of 124 “languages”, showing that it acquires generalizable representations of stress patterns in a very high proportion of runs. We also show that the neural network can learn lexically specified patterns of stress, something constraint-based approaches to stress acquisition require extra mechanisms to accomplish. And finally we demonstrate that the model, in an agent-based simulation, is biased toward systematic patterns of stress, despite having the expressive power to memorize its training data.
Open Access
LLMs highlight the importance of interaction in human language learning

25. September 2025

Ross D. Kristensen-McLachlan, Pablo Contreras Kallens, Morten H. Christiansen

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Recent years have seen large language models (LLMs) achieve impressive performance with core linguistic abilities. This can be taken as a demonstration that, contrary to long-held assumptions about innate linguistic constraints, language can be learned through statistical learning from linguistic input alone. However, statistical language learning in these models differs from human learners in a crucial way: human language acquisition evolved not simply as passive absorption of linguistic input but is instead fundamentally interactive, guided by continuous feedback and social cues. Recent advances in LLM engineering have introduced an additional step in model training that utilizes more human-like feedback in what has come to be known as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). This procedure results in models which more closely mirror human linguistic behaviors – even reproducing characteristic human-like errors. We argue that the way RLHF changes the behavior of LLMs highlights how communicative interaction and socially informed feedback, in addition to input-driven statistical learning, can explain fundamental aspects of language learning. In particular, we take LLMs as models of “idealized statistical language learners” and RLHF as a form of “idealized language feedback”, arguing that this perspective offers valuable insights into our understanding of human language development.
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Incremental learning of lexically specific morphophonology: an integrative approach

24. September 2025

Gaja Jarosz

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Acquisition and processing results indicate idiosyncratic, lexical knowledge interacts with productive, grammatical knowledge in systematic ways. Evidence from language processing demonstrates that higher frequency and less productive complex words are more likely to be retrieved holistically from the mental lexicon rather than being decomposed into constituents. Meanwhile, acquisition findings in both natural and artificial languages provide important evidence about the time course of learning and the role that lexical conditioning plays during development. Finally, work in experimental phonology demonstrates adult native speakers have productive knowledge of lexicalized morphophonological patterns, with learners extending lexical trends stochastically to novel forms. Although there have been significant computational advances in modeling the learning of such gradient grammatical generalizations, less attention has been devoted to modeling the joint learning of both the lexical and grammatical components of these systems, their interactions, and their connections to the processing and acquisition findings. This paper examines concrete predictions that two families of existing models of lexical and grammatical learning make across all three of these empirical domains. I show the models already align well with existing processing evidence on lexicalization effects, identify aspects of their predictions requiring further attention, and discuss implications for linguistic theory and computational modeling.
Open Access
Attention-LSTM autoencoder simulation for phonotactic learning from raw audio input

8. September 2025

Frank Lihui Tan, Youngah Do

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This paper presents a learning simulation of phonotactics using an attention-based long short-term memory autoencoder trained on raw audio input. Unlike previous models that use abstract phonological representations, the current method imitates early phonotactic acquisition stages by processing continuous acoustic signals. Focusing on an English phonotactic pattern, specifically the distribution of aspirated and unaspirated voiceless stops, the model implicitly acquires phonotactic knowledge through reconstruction tasks. The results demonstrate the model’s ability to acquire essential phonotactic relations through attention mechanisms, exhibiting increased attention to phonological context which shows higher phonotactic predictability. The learning trajectory begins with a strong reliance on contextual cues to identify phonotactic patterns. Over time, the system internalizes these constraints, leading to a decreased reliance on specific phonotactic cues. This study suggests the feasibility of early phonotactic learning models based on raw auditory input and provides insights into both computational modeling and infants’ phonotactic acquisition.
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Evaluating learning trajectories of neural morphology acquisition models

8. September 2025

Jordan Kodner, Salam Khalifa, Sarah Payne, Zoey Liu

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Computational models of morphology acquisition have played a central role in debates over the nature of morphological representations since the origin of the “past tense debate” in the 1980s. The apparent success of recent artificial neural network architectures for morphological inflection in natural language processing has revitalized this debate. However, despite their often good performance, the actual suitability of these advanced neural networks as models of human morphology acquisition remains uncertain. We argue that much of this confusion stems from inconsistent methods of training and evaluation. In this work, we demonstrate that more careful dataset creation and an evaluation combining quantitative analysis and comparison with human development puts the evaluation of neural models on firmer ground.
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Some innate characteristics of neural network models of morphological inflection

5. September 2025

Sarah Payne, Jordan Kodner

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Neural network models of morphological inflection (NNMIs) have seen impressive improvements over the last several decades. These improvements, however, lie in raw accuracy and other practical issues. When the performance of these models is instead compared to that of child learners, many of the shortcomings of the classic models persist in today’s NNMIs: (1) they struggle with generalization across sparse paradigms, (2) they are prone to over-irregularization, and (3) they do not follow child acquisition trajectories. The persistence of these issues suggests that they reflect inherent or “innate” characteristics of NNMIs as a class which are distinct from the characteristics of human language learners. As such, even substantial practical improvements do not necessarily entail increased cognitive plausibility.
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Instance memory models as a general computational framework for exploring language processing: bringing the lexicon to life

29. August 2025

Brendan T. Johns, Randall K. Jamieson, Matthew J.C. Crump, Michael N. Jones

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Instance models have been successfully applied to a range of problems including memory, language, attention, learning, action, decision-making, and categorization. According to instance theory, the individual experience constitutes the fundamental unit of knowledge and knowledge of the general emerges during parallel retrieval from memory. Until recently, applications of instance theory to the problem of language were constrained to small and contrived laboratory experiments. However, recent advances in large-scale computational modeling have allowed the approach to be applied at scale to the large and complicated problem of natural language. With those demonstrations now in hand, we argue that the framework can present an articulate mechanistic underbelly to usage-based theories of language that highlights the role of specific language experience in general language behavior. Overall, this article argues that instance memory models provide an opportunity to gain insight into and deepen our understanding of language as a dynamic and contextually embedded process, serving to bridge the gap between cognitive psychology and the language sciences.
Open Access
On the synchrony and diachrony of causal jako-że-clauses in Polish

29. Juli 2025

Łukasz Jędrzejowski

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In this article, I examine causal clauses in Polish introduced by the complementizer jako że/iż ‘because’ (lit. ‘as that’). Synchronically, I argue that jako-że/iż -clauses can express distinct reason relations operating on different semantic levels. By focusing on their content interpretation, I provide evidence showing that jako-że/iż -clauses are syntactically integrated adverbial clauses. The main arguments for this claim come from information-structural movement to the left periphery of the matrix clause and quantificational binding. Diachronically, I show that jako could already be used as a causal C-head in Old Polish (up to 1543), and that the declarative complementizer że/iż ‘that’ was incorporated into the causal clause structure in the transition from Old to Middle Polish.
Open Access
Fakespeak-RUS: building a corpus of Russian fake news

29. Juli 2025

Elizaveta Kibisova, Silje Susanne Alvestad

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This article presents the methodology behind the creation of the Fakespeak-RUS corpus, a dataset of Russian fake and genuine news articles developed as part of the broader Fakespeak project. The most prominent challenge in compiling the corpus relates to the veracity of the articles. A previously used credibility-based approach, which relied on the reputation of news outlets, has been argued to be ineffective: even well-known fake news outlets occasionally publish truthful content, and vice versa. For the Russian data, the surge of low-credibility texts even in fact-checking requires attention to the expertise and potential bias of the fact-checkers. The carefully chosen solution for our corpus is to collect news articles labelled for veracity by the now Estonia-based, formerly Russian, independent fact-checking agency Provereno.Media. Another challenge, stemming from the diversity of the collected texts, lies in building a reference corpus of genuine news, which involves controlling for multiple variables, including source, register, size, authorship, and topic. To address this challenge and construct a quality reference dataset, we gather and verify genuine news articles from the same outlets as those included in the fake news corpus. The corpus is well suited for linguistic research on the language of fake news in Russian.
Open Access
Veracity and register in fake news analysis

14. April 2025

Bashayer Baissa, Matteo Fuoli, Jack Grieve

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This article addresses two fundamental methodological challenges in linguistic fake news research: how to reliably classify news texts as real versus fake and how to control for register variation when building datasets for comparative analysis. We call for a rethinking of the veracity labels produced by fact-checking services. While fact-checkers remain a valuable resource for identifying fake news texts, their labels are more productively seen as a proxy for the communicative intent of the author, rather than as an absolute measure of veracity. This perspective emphasizes communicative intent as the only viable explanation for systematic linguistic differences between real and fake news and sidesteps the politically charged notion of truth. To address potential confounds caused by register and topic variation, we propose a multipronged comparative approach. This method analyzes fake news alongside real news on the same topic from a variety of news registers, allowing us to isolate linguistic differences driven by intent. We exemplify this approach by building a comparative corpus focused on climate change, vaccinations, and COVID-19, which we make available upon request for other researchers to use.
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Quoting to deceive: fake quotes and political delegitimization in Spanish far right grassroots disinformation campaigns

8. April 2025

Agnese Sampietro

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This paper focuses on the deliberate fabrication of quotations attributed to rival politicians by Spanish far right activists and their dissemination on social media (particularly Twitter/X). It argues that such practices can be viewed as attempts to undermine the credibility and legitimacy of political adversaries. The data were obtained from Al Descubierto (http://aldescubierto.org), an organization specializing in tracking disinformation spread in Spain by the far right. This study examines a collection of anti-government disinformation, specifically focusing on the content of fake quotes attributed to government officials or other left-leaning politicians. The analysis uncovers a calculated attempt to portray left-wing politicians as incompetent leaders, thereby undermining their legitimacy to govern the nation. Specifically, it shows that fake quotes can help present politicians as immoral and their policies as irrational. In short, these fabricated quotes are used to erode trust in governing institutions and delegitimize politicians and policy initiatives.
Open Access
Annotation and linguistic analysis of claim types for fact-checking

25. März 2025

Oliver Deck, Z. Melce Hüsünbeyi, Leonie Uhling, Tatjana Scheffler

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Among the news items circulating in social media, only some contain factual statements, and factual claims can be differentiated by their check-worthiness. We describe the check-worthiness annotation of a novel corpus of claims obtained from real-world submissions to a German fact-checking organization: the German Crowd Claims (GCC) corpus. We iteratively adapted existing annotation guidelines, introducing the novel category of incident/event and a third level of annotation for statements. Exploratory analysis of 35 linguistic surface-level features highlights sentence length as the strongest predictor of check-worthiness, but remains inconclusive for more specific annotation. We therefore investigated the performance of transformer-based models for check-worthiness detection on the GCC corpus, in which classification accuracy was increased by translating the dataset into English, augmenting the dataset by adding additional data from a related task, and enriching the semantics by including related ontology embeddings.
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COVID-19 vaccine conspiracy theories, discourses of liberty, and “the new normal” on social media

11. März 2025

Mark McGlashan, Isobelle Clarke, Matt Gee, Tatiana Grieshofer, Andrew Kehoe, Robert Lawson

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Public distrust in government, pharmaceutical companies, healthcare professions, and medical science and technology has been consistently linked with vaccine rejection. Policymakers, therefore, want to better understand links between distrust of institutions and vaccine refusal. This paper reports on a case study of posts (tweets) to the social media platform Twitter (now X) collected as part of the TRAC:COVID (Trust and Communication: A Coronavirus Online Visual Dashboard) project. The TRAC:COVID dashboard combines methods from corpus linguistics with various visualization techniques to enable users to explore approximately 84 million posts containing reference to COVID-19 published between 1 January 2020 and 30 April 2021 (encompassing the dates of UK coronavirus lockdowns). The dashboard and all sampling considerations (including an overview of the detailed search query used) are available at https://www.traccovid.com. Specifically, the paper analyses a subsample of posts that make reference to vaccines and contain at least one hashtag relating to various categories of dis/misinformation. By employing keyword co-occurrence analysis – a method for examining statistically significant keywords using multiple correspondence analysis – we find that these posts draw on various “discourses of liberty” to protest against perceived infringements on “health freedoms” through the imposition of new norms of behaviour (e.g., mask-wearing).
Open Access
The analysis of utterances with imperative forms in Hungarian health-related fake news

24. Februar 2025

Anett Árvay, Katalin Nagy C., Tibor Szécsényi, Enikő Németh T.

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This paper aims to contribute to the linguistic detecting of disinformation by providing a corpus-based form-to-function study of Hungarian health-related fake news. It starts from the hypothesis that there is a difference between fake and real news regarding the use of directives as a potential tool of exerting pressure on readers. The most direct and strongest strategy of performing directives in Hungarian is the use of a verb with an imperative suffix. However, the same suffix can also appear without any directive function in subjunctive structures. In order to determine which function utterances containing verbs with an imperative ending have, a manual pragmatic annotation was carried out in our MedCollect corpus. Three major groups of utterances were distinguished: (i) utterances with directive function, (ii) utterances with discourse function, and (iii) utterances without any directive or discourse function. The results support our hypothesis that fake news contains a significantly higher number of directives performed using this direct strategy due to a higher motivation of placing pressure on readers.
Open Access
Using ATLAS.ti to interpret keyword co-occurrence analysis: a case study on the representation of vaccin* across pseudoscience and conspiracy websites

14. Februar 2025

Yuze Sha, Isobelle Clarke

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In this study we use ATLAS.ti to interpret the results of a keyword co-occurrence analysis (KCA) of fake vaccination news. Specifically, KCA is used to uncover the most dominant patterns of co-occurring keywords across a corpus of 37,676 texts from 235 pseudoscience and conspiracy websites that mention vaccin* . KCA enables researchers to examine linguistic patterns of fake news from multiple angles, including discourse, register, style, and attitude. Yet, the interpretation of KCA can be time-consuming, especially when texts are long. Consequently, in this study, we leverage ATLAS.ti’s code co-occurrence analysis functionality, which streamlines and accelerates the interpretation of KCA results by providing access to extended concordances that highlight the patterns of keyword co-occurrence. Taking the second most prominent dimension as a demonstration, we interpret this pattern of keyword variation across our vaccination corpus as distinguishing texts that are questioning the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in relation to higher power control, from texts that are discussing childhood vaccines, especially with respect to the dangers they pose. The implications of these linguistic repertoires in relation to fake news and anti-science strategies are discussed.
Open Access
GERMA: a comprehensive corpus of untrustworthy German news

10. Februar 2025

Fabio Carrella, Alessandro Miani

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The proliferation of online misinformation undermines societal cohesion and democratic principles. Effectively combating this issue relies on developing automatic classifiers, which require training data to achieve high classification accuracy. However, while English-language resources are abundant, other languages are often neglected, creating a critical gap in our ability to address misinformation globally. Furthermore, this lack of data in languages other than English hinders progress in social sciences such as psychology and linguistics. In response, we present GERMA, a corpus comprising over 230,000 German news articles (more than 130 million tokens) gathered from 30 websites classified as “untrustworthy” by professional fact-checkers. GERMA serves as an openly accessible repository, providing a wealth of text- and website-level data for testing hypotheses and developing automated detection algorithms. Beyond articles, GERMA includes supplementary data such as titles, publication dates, and semantic measures like keywords, topics, and lexical features. Moreover, GERMA offers domain-specific metadata, such as website quality evaluation based on factors like bias, factuality, credibility, and transparency. Higher-level metadata incorporates various metrics related to website traffic, offering a valuable tool into the analysis of online user behavior. GERMA represents a comprehensive resource for research in untrustworthy news detection, supporting qualitative and quantitative investigations in the German language.
Open Access
This is how to recognize conspiracy theory–based alternative news media: a comparative analysis of style, text structure, and argumentation in alternative news media and mainstream news media

7. Februar 2025

Yvette Linders, Jochem Aben, Margot van Mulken

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Conspiracy beliefs are associated with negative outcomes on a personal and societal level. Therefore, it is important to help people recognize texts that might spread conspiracy theories, such as news articles from alternative news media (ANM). In order to do so, insight is needed into the linguistic features of these types of articles. In this paper (i) stylistic, (ii) structural, and (iii) argumentation features are analyzed to see to what extent they might help readers in recognizing ANM. The results demonstrate that (i) ANM use more clickbait features per headline than mainstream media (MSM), but that some clickbait features are used by ANM and MSM alike; that (ii) the last paragraph in ANM often presents an evaluation or opinion, whereas last paragraphs in MSM usually present additional information; and that (iii) the way quotes are used as arguments seems similar at first glance, but a more detailed look might help readers recognize ANM news articles. These results can be used to design educational interventions to help readers in learning to distinguish different types of news sources and be more resilient towards conspiracy theories.
Open Access
Language ideology as fake news

4. Februar 2025

Adnan Ajšić

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Fake news has a long history despite coming to the fore of academic debates only recently. The current fake news epidemic is related to the rise in right-wing populism globally, while social media has been central to the rapid spread of misinformation and the corrosive influence of right-wing populist discourses thriving on online conspiracy theories and disinformation campaigns. But does this trend have identifiable historical antecedents? I argue that 1980s and 1990s Serbian nationalist propaganda, especially its deployment of pseudoscientific discourses on language with their underlying language ideologies, may be a direct antecedent and an instructive case study for our understanding of the current wave. The discussion is based upon a corpus of Serbian news published between 2003 and 2008, and the application of advanced methods such as exploratory factor analysis and topic modeling. The findings show that the Central South Slavic language conflict has been characterized by pseudoscientific argumentation deployed as (fake) news. I suggest that there is a link between Central South Slavic ethnolinguistic contestation and contemporary Western far right discourses, contending that pseudoscientific argumentation is a major type of fake news in the service of illiberal causes and should be a central element in analyses of the phenomenon.
Open Access
Implicit pragmatic phenomena in headlines of Hungarian health-related fake news

30. Januar 2025

Enikő Németh T., Zsuzsanna Németh, Katalin Nagy C.

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Fake news is often designed with clickbait headlines to reach a wide readership. The current work focuses on implicit pragmatic phenomena in fake news headlines, namely implicit arguments, implicit contents in speech acts, and implicatures, in order to add to the findings of earlier research on the topic. It provides a corpus-based analysis of Hungarian health-related fake news headlines. It concludes that (i) implicit arguments in headlines create an information gap and are only used as tools of manipulation to generate clicks; (ii) the intended perlocutionary effect of the headlines that appear as speech acts with incomplete propositional content or implicit illocutionary force is not the effective transfer of information but rather to evoke emotions manipulatively; (iii) the goal of the unfair use of implicatures may be to avoid responsibility. This study reveals that the special combination of explicit and implicit content in fake news headlines can create or widen an information gap, manipulate readers by generating psychological effects, convey false information, and stimulate peripheral processing.
Open Access
From comparative to causal relations: the case of siccome ‘because’ in the history of Italian

6. Juni 2024

Emanuela Sanfelici, Sira Rodeghiero

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This article investigates how adverbial causal clauses come into being by tracking the diachronic development of the lexical item siccome ‘because’ from Old to Contemporary Italian. We show that adverbial causal clauses introduced by siccome in Contemporary Italian originate from comparative-similative clauses. By describing the steps of this diachronic change, we demonstrate that in specific contexts the comparative-similative marker has paved the way for a comparison between two events entailing a causal relation. The change is formalized by adopting a free relative clause analysis (Cinque 2020a. On the double-headed analysis of “headless” relative clauses. In Ludovico Franco & Paolo Lorusso (eds.), Linguistic variation: Structure and interpretation , 169–196. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter) to comparative and causal clauses.
Open Access
Causal clauses as source of sentential complementation: cross-linguistic evidence and methodological issues

12. März 2024

Rodrigo Hernáiz

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In many languages, causal clause markers can also function as – or are formally identical to – complement markers (e.g., Bulgarian če , Twi se , or Latin quod ). This isomorphism is often explained as the result of independent developments from a common source (interrogatives, relativizers, etc.). By contrast, it is also frequently accepted that in some cases the aforementioned identity originates in a type of structural change by which causal clauses are eventually reanalysed as factive complements. However, the nature of the proposed CAUSE > COMPLEMENT development, involving both semantic adjustments and syntactic integration, is not yet fully understood, and it remains unclear how recurrent this phenomenon might be from a cross-linguistic perspective. This article aims to shed light on these questions by analysing diachronic and cross-linguistic data and assessing some of the evidence given for the development of complementation from causal adverbial clauses. The observations reveal significant documentation gaps for postulated models of the emergence of complement clauses and highlight methodological issues that qualify previous explanations about the diachronic relationship between causal and complement clauses.

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