Volume 7, Issue 2 -

Based on an analysis of a globalized graffiti-event called Meeting of Styles, in Berchem (Antwerp, Belgium), August 2015, this paper makes two elementary points. One, and in general sociological terms, understanding contemporary social and cultural processes is difficult when we do not take into account the complex dialectics between “offline” and “online” dimensions of these processes. Two, more specifically, this also applies to linguistic landscape analysis, where localist interpretations of signs in public space now need to take into account the intense connections between such “offline” signs and “online” infrastructures of knowledge, interaction and identity that attribute meaning, function and value to such signs. While both points appear self-evident, their implications for theory and analysis are profound and in need of exploration.

This paper examines the meaning of plurality and diversity with respect to deaf children’s sign and spoken language exposure and repertoire within a super diverse context. Data is drawn from a small-scale project that took place in the North of England in a Local Authority (LA) site for deaf education. The project documented the language landscape of this site and gathered five individual case studies of deaf children to examine their plural and diverse language practices at home and at school. Analysis of the language landscape and case studies from this context is undertaken in order to define and exemplify deaf children’s language plurality and diversity in terms of context and individual experience. Concepts of repertoire are explored with particular reference to the unique type of translanguaging that the plural use of sign and spoken languages affords. Implications of these preliminary insights are discussed in terms of the development of methodologies that are sensitive to the particular translanguaging practices of deaf children, and approaches to pedagogy that are appropriately nuanced and responsive to deaf children’s language plurality and diversity.

Idioms – or something like idioms – occupy a special place as a speech genre in languages. It is compelling that the issues of what idioms are (or are not) and how they distinguish themselves from other related, though different, linguistic and phraseological categories, are of concern to all. This paper first examines various linguistic issues concerning the idiom genre before going into a detailed discussion about the chengyu in Chinese, which is an approximate yet by no means identical counterpart of the idiom as it is understood in English. It is argued that, as phrasal structures, Chinese chengyu s are not all lexically fixed, neither are they all semantically non-compositional. By virtue of the example of the sememe zhong lit. ‘(bronze) bell’ and its incorporation into certain chengyu s, it is demonstrated that the sememic constituents of a chengyu can be only not compositionally significant semantically speaking but also, they may well hold the key to the reason why the literal meaning of a chengyu should be closely integrated into its intended, idiomatic (figurative) meaning. Chengyu s that incorporate the sememe zhong comprise an idiomatic analogy and, in fact, zhong as a lexical item is represented in the content of this analogy as a cognitively real element. This paper adopts the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) framework as the basis for semantic analyses of such chengyu s.

In this paper we discuss the empirically documented difference in a mock-jury judgement task between native speakers of English and speakers of English as a second language. We discovered a difference between these two populations in the understanding of events described by witnesses with regard to the use of verbs may and might . The events described with may were scored much higher on the possibility and witness certainty scales than when the same events were described with might by the non-native English speakers. On the other hand, the native speakers of English did not judge the events described with may and those with might differently. Further, the results for the non-native speakers did not vary based on their L1. A closer look at a sample of textbooks has provided support for the hypothesis that it is the L2 instruction materials and a specific learner strategy that are the most likely causes of the significant difference in inference and judgement between the two speaker groups. We discuss these findings in light of their applicability in, and their relevance for, legal contexts of witness testimony and jury judgement as well as their pedagogical implications and applications.

This study investigated verbal report styles for eliciting strategies data from second language listeners. It examined outcomes from three different mediation (prompting) styles, one style unprompted and the two others prompted, after the learners were first provided with low-prescriptive instructions on how to complete the report. Also, the unprompted style was additionally examined after the provision of more-prescriptive instructions to observe the effect of this greater learner guidance. Theoretically, the core of the study examined two competing cognitive perspectives on verbal reporting. One, from an information processing perspective, is that verbal reports elicit the best insight into individuals’ strategic processes when prompts are kept to a minimum. The other perspective, a constructivist one, advocates the use of prompts in the form of researcher questions, mainly to help guide the report. Seventeen Taiwanese EFL learners participated in the study, with data gathered from each through a verbal report followed by a semi-structured interview. It was found that researcher prompting was both strongly favored by the learners and clearly elicited the best data for second language listener strategies research. The results also indicated that unprompted reports were little more effective when preceded by more-prescriptive instructions.