Volume 9, Issue 1

This article reports on an empirical study investigating what makes Japanese learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) unwilling to speak English, regardless of their learning period, proficiency level, and location of the communication. The current study focuses on the self-perception of second language (L2) English abilities, anxiety, and interlocutors as possible causes of their unwillingness to speak L2 English, compared with first language (L1) Japanese. An online questionnaire was administered to 27 Japanese undergraduate students (age: 19–22) with non-English majors at a national university in Tokyo, Japan. The results show that the elements depressing the self-perception and willingness to speak are fundamental to managing human relationships in speaking situations, which have more impact on L2 English than L1 Japanese contexts. This is attributable to other-directedness, which has been discussed as being characteristic of Japanese and Chinese EFL learners. Furthermore, it appears plausible to assume that the other-directedness derives more from “considerations for others” than “face-saving.” Future work will further investigate what constitutes Japanese other-directedness, compared with Chinese EFL learners’.

Factors in sound change are still a major subject of debate in the field of linguistics, with the frequency factor perhaps being the most controversial. The present article focuses on palatalization of the velars before high front vowels and glides in Northern Mandarin, because palatalization stretched for more than 100 years and can provide detailed information concerning its contour. Based on a statistical analysis of corpus data of palatalization in Northern Mandarin, the present article argues that the factor of frequency is positively associated with palatalization and the factor of frequency change is negatively associated. Morphosyntactic structure and word class are also claimed to be factors in sound change. However, neither of these two factors has emerged as significant in the current study.

Novice translation graduates are often found to be slow translators. The fact that this deficiency is usually rectified through professional experience implies that initial performance issues are the outcome of a complex interplay of factors, which do not involve intrinsic abilities. Based on insights from cognitively oriented research on students’ beliefs about language learning and the impact these beliefs have on students’ performance, the present study posits that the beliefs students have towards the question of translation speed represent one of the factors that fashion their productivity. Targeting graduates from the English Language and Translation programme at a private university in an Arab Gulf State, a mixed method approach, including a survey and a semi-structured interview, was adopted to explore the beliefs students have towards the question of speed and to identify the sources of these beliefs in their training programme. Analysis reveals that productivity awareness among the investigated population is almost non-existent and points at the predominantly product-oriented approach that characterises their learning experience as the main source of this condition. This article argues that improving students’ awareness of productivity requirements is not just a case of integrating timed activities, but calls for the adoption of multi-layered process-oriented training principles and practices at the level of delivery, feedback, and assessment criteria.

Natural language meaning has properties of both cognitive representations and formal/mathematical structures. But it is not clear how they actually relate to one another. The central aim of this article is to show that properties of cognitive representations and formal/mathematical structures of natural language meaning, albeit apparently divergent, can be united, as far as the basic properties of semantic structures are concerned. Thus, this article will formulate the form of unified representations for semantic structures. With this goal, this article takes into account standard formal-semantic representations and also Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) representations on the one hand and semantic representations in different versions of Conceptual/Cognitive Semantics (Jackendoff’s, Langacker’s and Talmy’s approaches to Conceptual/Cognitive Semantics) and representations of Mental Spaces (Fauconnier’s approach) on the other hand. The rationale behind the selection of these approaches is that the representations of semantic structures under these approaches are all amenable to unification. It must be emphasized that showing that the representations of semantic structures under these approaches can be unified does not simply amount to unifying these theories/approaches in toto. Rather, it is to demonstrate that cognitive representations and formal/mathematical structures can be shown to be inter-translatable for at least some accounts of linguistic meaning.

This Critical Discourse Analysis examines hedging as a linguistic device at the intersection of scientific discourse and women’s language. Hedging has been identified as a marker of scientific discourse where it is valued for expanding dialogic space for the promulgation of knowledge. It is also a recognised marker of women’s common language, where it is purported to align with discriminatory gender norms that women should not impose their views but could also be construed as a lack of clear thinking, conviction, or confidence. This could be limiting, especially in professional domains, however, the particular value attached to hedging in scientific discourse challenges this hypothesis and provides the focus of this study of gender differences in hedging with modal auxiliary verbs in the context of scientific discourse. The findings confirm hedging as a marker of scientific discourse and reflect modal auxiliaries being used with similar frequency by women and men, although with subtle, but significant differences in the specific modals that were used, and how. This provides a nuanced picture of women hedging in ways that mostly exemplify the standards of scientific discourse while also integrating some of the socially normative hedging practices that are associated with women’s language.

This research proposes to define the timbre of front vowels [e] and [i] in the spontaneous speech of the Spanish interlanguage spoken by Chinese people and to determine the convergent and divergent features of Peninsular Spanish. Variables such as gender, level of Spanish proficiency and the (a)tonicity of the vowels will also be assessed to see the extent to which these factors influence the pronunciation of the learners. A corpus of 1,489 front vowels produced by 36 Chinese speakers and a corpus of 420 vowels produced by 79 Spanish speakers were used for this study. The mean F 1 and F 2 values were calculated for each vowel. According to the statistical analysis of spontaneous speech, the interlanguage and the target language are similar in that the sounds [i] and [e] are significantly different, the atonic and tonic [i] show no significant differences and the tonic [e] is more open than the atonic [e] in both genders. However, the interlanguage diverges more from the target language because the timbre of the front vowels is more dispersed, that of [i] is more closed and fronted and that of [e] is more open and fronted, in both males and females, tonic and atonic. Finally, the study reveals that the level of language proficiency and tonicity are factors that influence the acquisition of pronunciation.

After a period of space-centred description of demonstratives, recent research has highlighted the role of attention, psychological proximity and shared knowledge in determining deictic choice. While convincing evidence has been presented that mental states may define deictic reference (e.g. in Turkish, Jahai or Kogi), there is also neuroscientific data suggesting that spatial cognition is often drawn upon in the process and that spatial and attentional perspectives may interact with each other. Pragmatic analysis of deictic usage in some languages (e.g. Yucatec or Lao) suggests that demonstrative systems may respond to multidimensional search spaces that include not only spatial but also embodied, perceptual and social access to referents. On the basis of observational data from Phola, a Tibeto-Burman language of Southwest China, the present article contributes to these research endeavours by explicitly exploring how speaker and addressee demonstratives may independently respond to both spatial and sociocognitive modes of access to a referent. Advancing the notion of spheres of interest as a descriptive heuristics to capture this fluidity, it is shown how deictic choice not only passively reflects aspects of context but also actively projects intersubjective appraisals and expectations onto material and social reality.

Recent sociolinguistic studies have emphasized the role of the linguistic landscape (LL) in relation to languages and identity negotiation. The present study examines the presence of Asturian, a minoritized language spoken in the Principality of Asturies, in the LL of a town located in the center of Asturies: Mieres. Through qualitative analyses, data illustrate that Asturian has visibility not only on top-down signage but also on bottom-up. Furthermore, findings reveal that the use of this language, as well as semiotic resources that convey the Asturian identity in the Mieres signage, portray the struggles and fragility of the Asturian minoritized linguistic group within this locality. This study illustrates the importance of comprehensive implementation of language protection policies in relation to the maintenance and revitalization of minoritized languages, as well as in the protection of a speech community’s linguistic rights.

The article aims at analyzing data on the South Korean linguistic landscape, with a focus on multilingual practices and different dimensions of language use, sets of norms, and ideological constructs underling particular linguistic choices. It is based on the analysis of a data set of over 800 digital photos of various signs and advertisements as well as necessary metadata gathered in 2018–2020 in four different urban contexts. The data, on the one hand, reflect recent changes favoring multilingualism; on the other hand, they demonstrate pragmatic inequality of other languages than Korean in public use. This inequality, however, is represented differently in certain spatial urban contexts; while commodified English tends to function as a substitution for other foreign languages and as an emblem of “foreignness,” agentivity of new ethnically diverse speakers creates “multilingual islands,” and that process can at some point challenge the dominance of monolingual ideology.

In this article, we provide further evidence that Bogotá Spanish is transitioning from being an extensively usted- using variety into one in which tú is preferred in informal interaction by analyzing survey data through a quantitative approach, and metalinguistic commentary through a qualitative approach. Our data show that tú is mainly thought of as a productive way to convey proximity. At the same time, our data show that, despite this change in second person preference, usted and sumercé persist in familiar address, albeit at rates considerably lower than tú. Usted is particularly frequent among males in same-gender dyads because it allows them to avoid the possible connotations of effeminacy that tú may have in that specific context. Sumercé is frequently selected in addressing older relatives and individuals from the countryside because it is seen as being capable of conveying respect and affection simultaneously. Moreover, sumercé is seen as a sign of local identity capable of distinguishing Bogotá Spanish from other national varieties with vos, which is marginal in our data. Our findings are best seen through the proposal that address forms may gain specific meanings within their particular context of use, despite having more conventional meanings attached to them.

Manner of speaking verbs denote the transfer of a message through speech, emphasizing the volume, intensity, comprehensibility, psychophysical condition of the speaker, and/or the impression that the speaker leaves on the hearer. In this article, verbs are semantically divided into four subclasses: 1. Verbs with emphasis on volume, 2. verbs of incomprehensible speaking, 3. verbs of meaningless speaking and complaining, and 4. verbs with emphasis on emotional component. Their syntactic peculiarities have been extensively researched in English, while no special attention has been paid to these verbs in Croatian. It is stated that in Croatian they are monovalent verbs. However, these verbs can be bivalent, and even trivalent. The recipient can be expressed by a dative complement within all four semantic subclasses. With the verbs of loud speaking and verbs with negative emotions, it can be expressed by a prepositional complement na ‘at’ + accusative and za ‘after’ + instrumental. The theme can be expressed by a quotation and a clausal complement, a prepositional complement o ‘about’ + locative, an accusative complement, sometimes a prepositional complement protiv ‘against’ + genitive, za ‘for’ + accusative, and with fewer verbs with prepositional phrases za ‘for’ + instrumental or nad ‘over’ + instrumental. Interestingly, there are certain restrictions for the complements’ combination within the same clause, which are described in more detail in the article.

The present article purported to gain insights about English as a second language (ESL) learners’ knowledge of grammatical functions at the declarative and the procedural levels in the higher education context, and argued that the dialogue between the types of knowledge calls for more attention. The study utilised a Words-in-Sentences Test that was administered to 841 ESL students in seven colleges and universities in three Arab countries: United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Oman. The test was used to measure the participants’ declarative knowledge of grammatical functions. The participants’ test scores were then correlated with their essay writing scores to find if there is a significant correlation between the two, and thus gain insight into the relationship between the declarative knowledge and the procedural knowledge of grammatical functions. Finally, a qualitative analysis was conducted on nine essays to gain an in-depth understanding of this relationship. The findings indicated that the university participants’ declarative knowledge of grammatical functions was below the expected level and that there was a significant correlation between the learners’ test scores and writing scores. In addition, intriguing themes emerged from the qualitative analysis. Together, the findings are anticipated to spark more research on grammatical function knowledge among university students in ESL contexts.

Even in this era of parameter-heavy statistical modeling requiring large training datasets, we believe explicit symbolic models of grammar have much to offer, especially when it comes to modeling complex syntactic phenomena using a minimal number of parameters. It is the goal of explanatory symbolic models to make explicit a minimal set of features that license phrase structure, and thus, they should be of interest to engineers seeking parameter-efficient language models. Relative clauses have been much studied and have a long history in linguistics. We contribute a feature-driven account of the formation of a variety of basic English relative clauses in the Minimalist Program framework that is precisely defined, descriptively adequate, and computationally feasible in the sense that we have not observed an exponential scaling with the number of heads in the Lexical Array. Following previous work, we assume an analysis involving a uT feature and uRel feature, possibly simultaneously valued. In this article, we show a detailed mechanical implementation of this analysis and describe the structures computed for that , which , and who/whom relatives for standard English.

Most corpora tacitly subscribe to a speech-only view filtering out anything that is not a ‘word’ and transcribing the spoken language merely orthographically despite the fact that the “speech-only view on language is fundamentally incomplete” (Kok 2017, 2) due to the deep intertwining of the verbal, vocal, and kinesic modalities (Levinson and Holler 2014). This article introduces the Freiburg Multimodal Interaction Corpus (FreMIC), a multimodal and interactional corpus of unscripted conversation in English currently under construction. At the time of writing, FreMIC comprises (i) c. 29 h of video-recordings transcribed and annotated in detail and (ii) automatically (and manually) generated multimodal data. All conversations are transcribed in ELAN both orthographically and using Jeffersonian conventions to render verbal content and interactionally relevant details of sequencing (e.g. overlap, latching), temporal aspects (pauses, acceleration/deceleration), phonological aspects (e.g. intensity, pitch, stretching, truncation, voice quality), and laughter. Moreover, the orthographic transcriptions are exhaustively PoS-tagged using the CLAWS web tagger (Garside and Smith 1997). ELAN-based transcriptions also provide exhaustive annotations of re-enactments (also referred to as (free) direct speech, constructed dialogue, etc.) as well as silent gestures (meaningful gestures that occur without accompanying speech). The multimodal data are derived from psychophysiological measurements and eye tracking. The psychophysiological measurements include, inter alia, electrodermal activity or GSR, which is indicative of emotional arousal (e.g. Peräkylä et al. 2015). Eye tracking produces data of two kinds: gaze direction and pupil size. In FreMIC, gazes are automatically recorded using the area-of-interest technology. Gaze direction is interactionally key, for example, in turn-taking (e.g. Auer 2021) and re-enactments (e.g. Pfeiffer and Weiss 2022), while changes in pupil size provide a window onto cognitive intensity (e.g. Barthel and Sauppe 2019). To demonstrate what opportunities FreMIC’s (combination of) transcriptions, annotations, and multimodal data open up for research in Interactional (Corpus) Linguistics, this article reports on interim results derived from work-in-progress.

This study aims to show how different political leaders ideologically position themselves in the discourse of ‘problem frame’ in their first national response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. To analyse the ideological nature of the ‘problem frame’, 17 leaders’ national lockdown speeches from different countries were collected and analysed within the theoretical framework of critical metaphor studies and frame semantics. Procedurally, metaphors in the collected speeches were identified by applying Pragglejaz Group’s MIP (2007) and MIPVU (2010), and coded into thematic categories via NVivo 12.0. Overall, 19 thematic codes (1,045 metaphorical expressions) were established, and their content analysis demonstrated specific differences in gender performance of a national health policy during the pandemic. It has been clarified that crisis political discourse is not that much affected by gender double bind, and female speakers openly display their femininity by focusing a lot on sensitivity and nurturance. By contrast, male speakers overwhelmingly follow a standardised competitive frame with emotional moments aimed at a more aggressive response to the pandemic and focusing on populist sentiment.

The Alpine region stands out in the German-speaking world for its well-preserved traditional dialects, which continue to play a significant role in daily life. However, the vast geographical range of the Alpine region and the limitations imposed by national and regional borders have hindered comprehensive investigations of the entire Alpine area. To overcome these obstacles, this study utilizes crowdsourcing data from the VerbaAlpina project to investigate phonological and morpho-phonological variation in the German-speaking Alpine region. Although the data were collected in a written form and with a focus on lexical variation, it is shown that the data contain detailed phonological information. By using multivariate dialectometric measurements (i.e. factor analysis [FA]) based on 19 (morpho-)phonological variables (comprising 8,582 tokens), the study explores the geolinguistic structures of the German dialects in the Alpine region. The results confirm, on a general level, the validity of the traditionally established dialect classification. However, the findings also reveal previously underrated border effects, in particular for Bavarian dialects along the German-Austrian border, which are argued to be the outcome of divergence processes. Hence, the study highlights the importance of cross-dialectal and cross-national perspectives in understanding dialect variation and emphasizes the value of crowdsourcing data for dialectological research.

Although the phenomenon of code-switching has been a subject of interest to sociolinguists since the 1970s, to date, little research has been conducted on the impact of gender on the frequency of code-switching, especially in oral communication. The current study is an attempt to bridge this gap by comparing code-switching instances in Snapchat advertisements made by 40 Saudi influencers (20 males and 20 females) who roughly belong to the same age group. The first 100 words made by each advertiser were included in the 4,000-word corpus. Although the female sample produced more instances of code-switching ( n = 60) than males ( n = 42), the hypothesis that there is a significant difference between males and females in the frequency of code-switching was rejected because the difference was not statistically significant either in the number of instances ( p value = 0.116) or in the number of English words ( p value = 0.149).

Despite the rapidly growing body of research on sound symbolism, one issue that remains understudied is whether different types of sensory information interact in their sound symbolic effects. The experimental study reported here consisted of two tasks and focused on one such potential interaction: size associations and cuteness. First, a forced-choice task was conducted in which size ratings were elicited for pseudowords containing different vowels and consonants. The pseudowords were introduced as names of alien creatures, which were used as visual stimuli in the experiment. Second, the cuteness of alien creatures was assessed in a judgement task. Both tasks were completed by the same group of German speakers. In line with previous research, /aː/ was associated with largeness and /iː/ was associated with smallness. Further, we found that cuteness modulates size associations in /aː/ and /iː/. For /aː/ judged size increased, while for /iː/ judged size decreased with increasing cuteness. Regarding consonants, we found that /ʁ/ evoked higher size associations than other consonants under investigation. Interactions of cuteness and consonants did not reach significance. Our findings call for the integration of other possible factors and features that might show sound symbolic effects or interactions with such in sound symbolism research.

The text is devoted to a rarely described and analysed problem of a gap in the distribution of aspectual prefixes in Polish. Lexical prefixes do not appear as parts of word-internal morphology of synthetic change of state (COS) verbs suffixed with verbalizing morphemes - e -/- ej -, - ną -, and - owa -. The analysis presented below treats such COS verbs as homonymous pairs of lexical items. The telic homonym is equipped with the result phrase (RP) headed by the zero morpheme, whose appearance blocks the insertion of any other telicizing morpheme in the form of a lexical prefix. The zero morpheme is selected by the verbalizers peculiar to COS verbs of synthetic type. The atelic homonym does not have the RP in its structure and, in consequence, does not include a structural position for telicizing heads in the form of lexical prefixes to be ever inserted. The model strongly supports the distinction between the concepts of telicity and perfectivity in Polish, and by extrapolation – in other Slavic languages.

This replication study examined the effects of writing prompt type on second language (L2) learners’ writing performance. Fifty undergraduate academic and professional writing course pupils wrote narrative essays about a past event (recalling group/high formulation demand condition) or a future event (imagining group/high conceptualization demand condition). Writers completed a freewriting draft and were then given unlimited opportunities to revise. The writing was subjected to syntactic complexity, fluency, accuracy, and lexical complexity analyses. Writer engagement was computed as the time spent revising drafts. The previous study’s results were confirmed in that the recalling group exhibited more complexity and less accuracy in their writing than the imagining group. The recalling group also exhibited a higher level of writing fluency and possessed a higher level of engagement. Furthermore, the results of our study showed that the imagining group produced writing that was slightly more lexically complex than the recalling group. The pedagogical importance of writing prompts and their potential for affecting writing performance and writing engagement was discussed.

The near-merger hypothesis has served to explain many situations where other explanations have not sufficed, including mainly those where apparently completed mergers have been reversed. However, the situation in the city of Malaga (Spain) calls for a critical review of the main pitfalls of this hypothesis and for a sociolinguistic reorganisation of sound change to allow for near-demergers. The present work focusses on the reversal of the coronal fricative /θ/ and /s/ merger ( Casa ‘house’ = Caza ‘hunting’) that has been widely observed in Malaga. Acoustic-perceptual analysis of the realisations of 54 speakers reveals that a completed phonological merger can, in fact, revert and that acoustic cues do not necessarily indicate a near-merger.

This is an introduction to the Special Issue Lexical constraints in grammar: Minority verb classes and restricted alternations. In many languages, grammatical relations are subject to lexical constraints. These constraints can be manifested in different morphosyntactic domains, for instance, through deviation from canonical case frames or different argument indexation patterns. Other constructions that have been studied through this lens are voice and valency constructions and some clause-combining constructions. The types of oppositions established by lexical constraints vary: some absolute restrictions entail the obligatory presence or absence of a grammatical marker, while others entail the ability of a lexical item to alternate. In the latter instance, differences in the statistical preferences for one construction over another may be observed. In some cases, verb classes can be easily identified based on a common semantic feature; however, various other factors can also lead to the formation of minority verb classes and restrictions on alternations. This article introduces a collection of four articles investigating lexical constraints in a variety of morphosyntactic domains, adopting different perspectives and methodologies. It sets out a framework for considering different opposition types formed by the differing behaviour of different verb classes and outlines a number of different factors that motivate the formation of verb classes. This introductory article shows that lexical constraints provide fertile ground for typologists adopting a token-based approach seeking to compare languages at ever-greater levels of specification.

This article investigates a case of lexical restrictions on a voice construction, specifically Danish past-tense passives. Present-Day Danish has both a periphrastic and an inflectional passive construction, but in the past tense, most ablaut (strong) verbs cannot form the inflectional passive (e.g. ∗ \ast skreves ‘was written’, ∗ \ast bares ‘was carried’). Various explanations for these restrictions have been proposed in the literature, but their historical background has not been investigated in any detail. This article focusses on the passive restrictions in Late Modern Danish, using various sources mainly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is shown that while lexical restrictions on the past-tense s -passive are already mentioned in eighteenth and nineteenth-century grammars, the grammaticality of the individual forms has changed; for instance, the now obsolete form skreves ‘was written’ is attested in several Late Modern Danish sources. Furthermore, the primary sources differ greatly with respect to their use of the passive in the past tense. I suggest that sociolinguistic variables, such as level of education and formality of the texts, must be taken into account when trying to explain the development of the Danish passive, and that the lexical restrictions on past-tense s -passives may in fact be a side effect of standardization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This article addresses the verb morphology of Komnzo, a language of Southern New Guinea. It provides a description of verb indexing in Section 1, which is followed by a corpus analysis of a small class of verbs. Komnzo verb morphology encodes transitivity by distinct alignment patterns in the verb morphology, which I call ‘verb templates.’ Templates encode participant constellation, e.g. transitive or ditransitive, as well as event structure, e.g. dynamic versus stative. The system allows for some fluidity as to which lexemes can be used in which template. In addition to the description, the main contribution of the article lies in an in-depth examination of the interaction between lexical semantics and the morphological structure in Komnzo. This article takes an empirical approach, which draws on evidence from a text corpus of over 12 h of natural speech and comprises more than 12,000 inflected verb forms.

Despite ample attention in the literature for alignment patterns and case frames more generally, we know very little about how these elements of grammar spread from one language to another in a contact situation. Achieving a better understanding of this will help explain areal patterns in alignment and grammatical relation marking. In this contribution, we zoom in on a contact situation in the foothills of North-West Amazon, where languages of the Quechuan and Tukanoan families are in contact, and where previous authors have suggested that grammatical relation marking shows many potential contact effects. We find that, despite the absence of loanwords, abstract lexico-grammatical information associated with individual lexical items may spread from one language to another, especially within the class of sensation predicates. These can be characterized as lexically driven diffusion patterns, without formal borrowing, consistent with an overall characterization of the area’s sociolinguistics as loanword-avoiding.

This article examines two types of lexical effects in the voice system of Kanakanavu, an Austronesian language of Taiwan. The first concerns a well-attested phenomenon in the Austronesian literature: interactions between the semantic transitivity of verbs and their ability (or lack thereof) to undergo voice alternation. The second concerns a phenomenon that is typologically and areally rare in the western Austronesian context – differential agent marking. The pronominal agent in Kanakanavu’s patient-/undergoer-voice construction is differentially case-marked depending on the tense-aspect value of the clause. However, lexical effects are found in how the differentially marked agent is interpreted. When dynamic verbs are used, omitted agents in perfective clauses are interpreted as coreferential with a specific referent mentioned in prior discourse, but those in non-perfective clauses are interpreted as having generic reference, backgrounded, and/or not centrally involved in the situation expressed by the verb. When stative verbs are used, alternation between perfective and imperfective verb forms may have various effects on the interpretation of the agent. In some stative verbs, the agent is interpreted as a prototypical semantic agent in the perfective, but as a semantic experiencer in the imperfective. In other stative verbs, the perfective/non-perfective alternation has to do with whether a change of state is involved, without having any effects on agent interpretation. This study explores how lexical effects manifest across both elicited and natural discourse data. It also presents the phenomenon of differential agent marking in Kanakanavu as neither typical nor representative in the western Austronesian context.

This article discusses Latinate Modern Greek (MG) terminology in the light of language planning, language contact, transliteration, registers, and speakers’ attitudes. It starts by describing sociolinguistic aspects of MG with respect to borrowing and proceeds with case studies of Latinate MG terms and their Greek-based synonyms from various science, arts, social, and technical fields. Focusing on phonological, morphological, semantic, and terminological issues such as semantic intra- and inter-linguistic transparency and consistency in the light of the long-standing cultural ties between Greece and the West, an updated approach to the form and utility of MG Latinate terms is attempted, aiming at influencing eventual language planning in Greek-speaking areas.

Over the past several decades, there has been an increasing interest in academic discourse investigations with a specific focus on disciplinary, cultural, and generic aspects of academic text construction. Studies of Spanish, Italian, Greek, Portuguese, French, German, and Russian (inter alia) academic discourse have revealed not only the universal features characteristic of many writing cultures, but also unique rhetorical features, typical of only some of them. In this article, we focus on academic discourse investigations in scientific texts written in one of the lesser-studied languages, Lithuanian. We review here studies of Lithuanian scientific discourse and what those studies reveal about the specific features of Lithuanian academic discourse. The first part of the article identifies how rhetorical structures differ between English and Lithuanian academic texts, whereas the second part presents a comprehensive overview of the functional groups of linguistic units, such as metadiscourse markers, stance and engagement markers, and conceptual metaphors, and how these are different or similar to English academic discourse. The overview of the empirical studies shows the current state of knowledge about Lithuanian academic discourse and highlights some of the items that distinguish Lithuanian writing. Furthermore, we highlight the importance of identifying academic writing traditions of other languages to acknowledge diversity.

This article explores state and university language policy (LP) agents in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to illuminate their relationship and standpoints in higher education language management. Being interested in who stands for what and whose positions are legitimised, we study the higher education LPs of each state, language principles of universities, and public debates. We conceptualise active LP agents as people with power, people with expertise, people with influence, and people with interest, and consider them to exercise agency in five stages: policy initiation, involvement, influence, intervention, and implementation. By means of argumentation analysis we examine the nature of agents together with the standpoints they express. The findings reveal the central role of most of the nationally oriented state policymakers in university language management in all three settings. Other state policymakers, university administrators, staff, and students become active agents when they disagree with the policies. Agents in each setting share the overarching policy goal, but the main difference of opinion that arises among them is about agency: Should the state or universities implement higher education LPs? And is the state capable of achieving the common policy goal when it takes the task upon itself?

The dominance of English in academic discourses is well established, with increased English publication used to evidence its increasing use at the expense of national language publication. However, while English publication frequency has increased over time, few studies have examined how university faculties outside higher education’s Anglophone center have changed their language of publication frequency. Thus, in this investigation, we analyzed a Japanese national university’s medical faculty’s overall frequency of publication along with publication frequency by language medium, expanding on an earlier diachronic analysis of university publication reports. We previously found English language publications largely replaced Japanese language publications for journal articles and that overall publication frequency dramatically increased. However, that initial diachronic analysis did not show when those changes manifested. The current investigation explores this through a decennial time trend historical document analysis of publication reports from 1979 to 2020. This analysis elucidates how publication frequency, type, and language medium have changed. Specifically, we find that the largest change in the overall frequency of publication is between 1989–1990 and 1999–2000. These changes are primarily driven by conference papers and other publications, publication types not typically examined in analyses of journal citation databases. Our findings establish a foundation to discuss potential causes of the trends we identify in this Japanese national university’s medical faculty’s publications.

This article investigates the pragmatic and functional aspects of an interrogative question pattern in Estonian: questions introduced by the adjective huvitav (‘interesting’). Despite appearances, this question is usually not used to elicit an answer in an information request. Instead, its uses vary from self-addressed to rhetorical questions, also allowing the addition of a biased (critical, ironical) positioning to the interrogation. It can be related to subjective as well as intersubjective dimensions of language use. Examples primarily from two corpora are discussed: fiction texts and their translations (Estonian–French) from the Estonian–French bilingual corpus; excerpts from the debates of the Estonian Parliament; and to a lesser extent, examples from conversations are also included in the analysis. Like similar devices described in other languages ( vajon in Hungarian, oare in Romanian), this pattern is impossible to use in situations where a clearly competent addressee is in a position to answer the question directly and the speaker is aware of it; instead, it is especially for cases where, for different reasons, the competence of the addressee is not questioned or challenged directly: asking tentative questions, using rhetorically designed questions to convey critics, or other biased meanings.

We present novel observations about types of questions which occur quite frequently in natural discourse but which have so far remained unanalyzed. These are questions about a question act. We then propose an account which derives the observations. Our account relies crucially on the assumption that speech acts are grammatically represented.

Among varied syntactic and semantic functions of the dative case in Latvian, the attitude dative or dativus ethicus is a less studied one. As an optional pronominal clitic, it serves two broad functions: first, it expresses the speaker’s authority and affectedness of the speaker or the addressee in a speech-act situation, and second, it expresses the speaker’s stance towards the contents of the utterance. In terms of register, the attitude dative normally occurs in informal interaction. The current study examines three basic types of attitude datives in Latvian and their functions in different syntactic constructions and speech acts. The examples are extracted from corpora as well as Latvian fiction and everyday speech. It follows from the examples that the attitude dative has different meanings in certain speech acts and syntactic constructions. The attitude dative is used in giving orders, expressing prohibition and threats, as well as showing disagreement, disappointment, and regret. The study suggests that the attitude dative tends to be used in lexicalized syntactic constructions (set expressions) including specific lexemes and grammatical forms, and its functions are emphasized with particles.

I describe and compare two strategies to form rhetorical questions (RQs) in Sm’algyax (Tsimshianic). I show that one kind is isomorphic to ordinary, information-seeking questions, and is compatible with positive and negative answers, while the second is marked with irrealis morphology and only allows negative answers. I provide evidence from answerability and embedding to suggest that both types of RQs in Sm’algyax behave like questions in terms of their syntax/semantics, and propose that the irrealis subordinator present in the second type signals to the addressee that a negative answer is expected. These findings have implications for the presence of irrealis and subjunctive morphology appearing in RQs crosslinguistically.

This study examines the linguistic metadiscourse on expressions perceived as ‘annoying’ and the strategies used to justify this perception. Two different types of data are examined in which verbal hygiene is practised in interaction: language biography interviews and anonymous online discussions. In the examined datasets, the discussion begins with an explicit question regarding annoying words and phrases. The themes discussed and the delegitimisation strategies adopted by a participant are affected by other participants. In interviews, minor reformulations of the question can be leading, and in online discussions, other writers regulate the debate with counter-arguments, which leads to a wider variety of delegitimisation strategies. The analysis also shows a counter-discourse to verbal hygiene.

The aim of this article is to show that a specific type of non-canonical question, namely surprise questions, needs to be defined in its own right and differentiated from rhetorical questions. The communicative function of surprise questions is explained on the basis of three constructions – what the hell questions in English, qu’est-ce que questions, and c’est quoi ce N (i.e. an in situ interrogative followed by a right dislocation) in French. Surprise questions are reported to be expressive and to request an explanation for or a change in an activity judged to be incongruous. However, only the intensification conveyed by the hell systematically guarantees the expressive reading. In French, the surprise reading is argued to rely on a combination of syntactic structure, prosodic features, and lexical items. While qu’est-ce que questions are syntactically more complex and diverse, the in situ construction followed by a right dislocation allows for the surprise reading to be more readily identified as such.

Tatar minorities have lived in Finland and Estonia as a multilingual diaspora for more than a century. This study explores how the different generations of Tatars living in Finland and Estonia perceive polite forms of address, focusing on the choice of informal and formal second-person pronouns and the use of kinship terms. The research material includes 7 h 20 min of semi-structured interviews conducted with nine Tatars from Finland and ten Tatars from Estonia. The results suggest a parallel tendency of variation in the address forms among the Finnish and Estonian Tatar minorities. Specifically, the Tatars in Finland are more likely to use sin, the second-person singular form (T-form), than the Estonian Tatars. This is similar to Finnish, where the T-form is more extensively used than in Estonian and Russian, which are the main contact languages of Tatar in Estonia. The results also propose that Finnish and Estonian Tatar diaspora members use kinship terms less as a polite form of address and accept being addressed by their first name. However, in standard Tatar, it is perceived to be impolite to address the interlocutor by only their first name without a kinship term or title. Many of the participants were also aware of these pluriareal differences in the use of T-forms and the use of Sez , the second-person plural form (V-form), and kinship terms in Tatar, suggesting the existence of meta-linguistic awareness among Tatar speakers in terms of polite language use.

Technology in the context of education is a subject of debate, from a very positive experience that promotes learning to a very negative one that prohibits the use of various smart devices, tools, programmes, and platforms in the classroom. The problem is how to find a balance between the two positions and how to encourage teachers to introduce possibilities of technologies to benefit the general education process. The topic of machine translation in educational contexts has gained the attention of the research community only recently. Previous studies not only point to the benefits that the technology may bring to the classroom, especially in foreign language learning, but also report mixed views of educators. This study, which is based on the findings from a survey of Lithuanian secondary school teachers, seeks to explore the current status of the inclusion of machine translation in the educational process from teachers’ perspective to envisage the teacher’s role as a facilitator or a mediator in developing children’s machine translation literacy. The conclusions that can be drawn imply that machine translation is rarely considered to be a useful technology by teachers, and its benefits are either unknown or underestimated. Therefore, the need for machine translation literacy instruction emerges.

This study focuses on how 15 Romanian literary translators metaphorically conceptualize their own role and importance and the role and significance of their translations. The aim of the analysis is to see what kind of source text–target text and author–translator relationships the conceptual metaphors suggested reflect, to zoom in on the status of the translator and of the translated text that may be inferred based on these conceptualizations and, finally, to see whether they support the traditional source vs target-orientation dichotomy in translation or call for a more hermeneutic-oriented approach.

This study compares and contrasts the English and adapted (remade) Arabic versions of the American series Suits 2011 in terms of cultural, religious, and ideological aspects. The researchers compiled a parallel comparable corpus extracted from both versions. Data analysis shows that there are several similarities and differences between the source and the target versions of Suits in terms of the cast, setting, opening and credits, daily life habits, morality, and social customs. The findings show that the Arabic version highly attends to the Muslim Arab cultural norms. Nevertheless, the Arabic version frequently contains unfamiliar and unacceptable behaviour to the Muslim Arab culture, such as smoking weed and trading drugs. In other words, there are some unexplained paradoxical changes made by the makers of the Arabic version, such as adding scenes to a few episodes similar to those that were deleted in previous episodes for cultural considerations. Due to the lack of consensus on what is and what is not suitable for the target Muslim Arab audience, this study recommends that media decision-makers in the Arab World compile a list of codes that can regulate the adaptations (remakes) of famous foreign shows into the Muslim Arab culture.

The present article focuses on strategies for translating general extenders (GEs) from English into Romanian. Starting from the generally accepted definition of GEs as structures that extend utterances that are otherwise grammatically complete and that are placed in phrase- or clause-final position, I analyze samples of literary text and their respective (multiple) versions and investigate patterns in which these structures are translated. Since, as pointed out in the literature, GEs can fulfill more than one function in the text, and since in literary texts they tend to be repeatedly and meaningfully employed, the article investigates to what extent a Romanian translator can render this type of pragmatic marker into the target language in a fluid manner. This question is intriguing for at least two reasons: (a) Romanian seems to employ GEs in a more restricted manner than English and (b) repetition seems to be a stumbling block in translation. In order to solve this problem, a translator resorts to lexical variety, compensation, and omission.

The present article proposes to focus on the reception of dystopian literature and the way in which the Romanian public resonated with it, paying particular attention to the translations of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale . The article will discuss Atwood’s emphasis on borders, both literal and figurative, the combination of characters, cultures and languages that come to life as a result of those borders being transgressed and the translation limitations that such a text imposes.

An ideal translator profile is a crucial issue for both translation providers, who want to deliver impeccable performance, and translation beneficiaries, whose purpose is to obtain flawless services. In the context of Romanian higher education, two distinct educational profiles of providers are distinguished in the business translation market: graduates of Philology, who have been trained in translation (3-year BA and 2-year MA programmes in Translation Studies), and graduates of Faculties of Economics or Business who have undertaken 3-year and/or 2-year MA study programmes in a foreign language. Showing the results of a study conducted with groups of third year Bachelor students of the University of Craiova, Romania (students in Translation Studies and students in the Finance and Banking English-taught programme), across a 3-year period (2015–2017), our research aims at providing answers to the following questions: To what extent does each of these two profiles match the ideal one of a business translator? What are the strengths and weaknesses of each of the two training profiles? What specific actions can and should be taken for each of the two target groups in terms of university training?

Fostering the social inclusion of all its citizens, the European Union strives to create a linguistically inclusive society. Among the Erasmus+ projects funded by the European Union to achieve this goal is Train2Validate which proposes a research-based educational framework within which easy-to-read validators and facilitators are professionally trained to be able to officially work and produce high-quality easy-to-read content. The article focuses on one stage of the project in which a lesson was piloted with a group of people with disabilities to verify whether the educational content created within the project meets their needs. The piloting session was organised in Timișoara, Romania, with Romanian trainees, and it pointed to some positive as well as some negative aspects. Among the positive aspects mentioned by them were the video lesson, the structure of the educational content, and the understandability of the language used. The tasks that they completed on paper and online showed a better performance online, although the trainees constantly needed the technical support of the facilitators, which was perceived as a drawback of the piloting session. All in all, the feedback received from the trainees during and after the piloting session helps the Romanian project team make better recommendations on the implementation of the project outcomes. In the end, the trainees hailed the project as a welcome initiative that contributes to the social and linguistic inclusion of people with disabilities.

This article aims at studying acronyms found in captions of six American TV series, as most scholarly articles only discuss abbreviations and acronyms in specialized texts, including their titles and abstracts as well. Hence, in the introductory part, we present reasons to use shortened forms (both abbreviations and acronyms), and then we offer a very brief summary of major types of shortenings, differentiating shorter forms originating from one-word or multi-word phrases, enabling us to separate acronyms, initialisms, and alphabetisms from standard abbreviations and its similar terms (truncation and clipping). After arguing that acronym may be used as the umbrella term for initialisms and alphabetisms as well, we define prototypical acronyms, which are traced in the first seasons of the six TV series with the help of a specifically designed algorithm. Acronym frequency in three medical TV series is compared to their frequency in political, legal, and military series, concluding that at least twice more acronyms were found in medical captions compared to non-medical ones, which means that an acronym is bound to appear within every other minute of the storyline. The conclusion section reiterates the idea that acronym use should be restricted, knowing that guidelines on captioning and subtitling have little impact on the creators.

The article discusses the increasing role of corpus data in translation studies (a field that has developed several autonomous sub-fields striving for full recognition), including mediated interviews of literary translators as paratexts complementing textual analysis in the translated text circulation, appreciation, and evaluation. The question of corpus design should be envisaged in conjunction with corpus usability, i.e. fitness for purpose. In this respect, it is important to train awareness of the potential of corpora of mediated interviews in real-life settings, in literary translation research and work environments. Furthermore, the article is intended to contribute to building more productive and innovative interfaces of corpus-based translation studies and literary translation studies in the digital humanities era, as well as to provide tools meant to bridge the gap between theory and practice.

By virtue of its very nature, the process of translating European legislation presents certain particularities that any translator working in this domain must be aware of. These particularities are mainly related to the manner in which the EU law is drafted, to the categories of people representing its intended audience, and to what is understood by the concept of equivalence. All these aspects determine an interesting interplay between the source and the target factors influencing the process of translating the EU law. Which are the source factors, on the one hand, and the target factors, on the other, that facilitate the creation of a good translation in this field? Which are the implications that the particularities of the process of translating EU legal texts have for the process of translator training? The article will offer some answers in this respect, relying on both theoretical information and qualitative research data relevant for the translation from English into Romanian.

The present article focuses on the analysis of how adverbs of evidential certainty are translated into Romanian in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray . Drawing on previous work, we argue that adverbs of certainty exhibit different interpretations function of their context of occurrence and their position in the clause. In this analysis, I am going to look at the different translation strategies employed in the ten Romanian translations of the book. We are interested in investigating the differences between the earliest translation and the most recent retranslations. We can safely assume that evidentiality is a universal semantic category that is coded differently in different languages. Therefore, it is going to be interesting to see how the rendering of evidential adverbs into Romanian differs from one translator to another across time. Adverbs of certainty express more often than not a degree of confidence on the part of the speaker alongside the speaker’s attitude toward the content of the sentence.

This article investigates the translation of multilingual fiction from English into Romanian by setting it under the lens of the novel Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The novel comprises three language varieties spoken by the Nigerian Igbo ethnic group. Bearing distinct sociocultural features, the interlingual transfer of the three language varieties (Nigerian English, Nigerian Pidgin English, and Igbo) impacts the preservation of the information relative to cultural items and to the social configuration of the local community. The sociolinguistic configuration of the text under analysis is first presented and exemplified as they integrate into the sociocultural context and are subsequently discussed by analysing relevant examples to illustrate the effectiveness of the translations. This descriptive approach to the translation envisages the detection of strategies adopted with a view to observing and preserving the author’s intentions, namely those of exhibiting Nigerian traditions and the contemporary sociolinguistic picture. The findings indicate that the translation of three language varieties posed different kinds of problems and required different translation strategies. The conclusions comprise some possible solutions for the translation of multilingual fictional discourse and its sociolinguistic features.

This article focuses on medical translation as a timely and accurate transfer of scientific knowledge and practical information alike and as a way of transforming knowledge into action. More specifically, it delves into the mechanisms underlying informed decision making in translating assessment scales in Physical Therapy. The main challenge lies in achieving precision and accuracy when dealing with this text type (assessment scales are medical documents bordering informative and vocative categories) and, especially, with the extremely dense and, in many cases, ambiguous terminology. We aim to work out a conceptual and methodological toolkit for medical terminology management and standardization, with a special focus on the language pair English–Romanian, while also raising awareness of the need for building relevant corpora and making them available for medical translators in order to boost their productivity and the translation quality. The examination of the principles of specialized corpus design and use (parallel corpora) is done in correlation with the development of the medical translator’s competence, comprising the ability to retrieve grammatical, lexical, terminological, and stylistic equivalents.