Volume 16, Issue 1 -

This study tests for similarities and differences in the uses of near-synonymous mental predicates by speakers of different ENL and ESL speech communities to capture whether, and if so to what degree, speakers of different first and second language English varieties use the four near-synonymous predicates semantically differently. Specifically, we focus on I believe, I think, I suppose and I guess in eight native and second-language varieties of English (i.e. American, British, Canadian, Irish, Hong Kong, Indian, Singapore and New Zealand). We adopt a multivariate modeling approach to analyze mental predicates annotated for six semantic variables (verifiability, epistemic mode, epistemic class, epistemic type, evaluation and negotiability) as well as genre. Our findings show the usefulness of exploring Englishes through the lens of semantic structure. Although, on the surface, two groups of English varieties emerge with different preferential patterns of predicates (British, Indian, Irish and Singapore vs. Canadian, Hong Kong and American), at a more abstract level, those predicates share similar semantic combinatory patterns common to all varieties in focus. It emerges that modeling the development of Englishes based on theoretical frameworks that account for simultaneous development of generic (i.e. common to all Englishes) and specialized (i.e. specific to individual Englishes) linguistic patterns may be beneficial. At a time when English has become a worldwide language shaped by globalization, the present study adds to the discussion on the developmental pathways that characterize the evolution of non-native Englishes in the twenty-first century.

Loanword use has dominated the literature on language contact and its salient nature continues to draw interest from linguists and non-linguists. Traditionally, loanwords were investigated by means of raw frequencies, which are at best uninformative and at worst misleading. Following a new wave of studies which look at loans from a quantitatively more informed standpoint, modelling “success” by taking into account frequency of the counterparts available in the language adopting the loanwords, we propose a similar model of loan-use and demonstrate its benefits in a case study of loanwords from Māori into (New Zealand) English. Our model contributes to previous work in this area by combining both the success measure mentioned above with a rich range of linguistic characteristics of the loanwords (such as loan length and word class), as well as a similarly detailed group of sociolinguistic characteristics of the speakers using them (gender, age and ethnicity of both, speakers and addresses). Our model is unique in bringing together of all these factors at the same time . The findings presented here illustrate the benefit of a quantitatively balanced approach to modelling loanword use. Furthermore, they illustrate the complex interaction between linguistic and sociolinguistic factors in such language contact scenarios.

Much of the patterned use of language occupies a poorly charted middle ground of usages that are neither frozen, one-off items listable in dictionaries nor products of maximally general rules found in grammars. Similarly, these usages fly below the radar of modular theories of language that make a strict distinction between items in a lexicon and the rules of syntax for combining them. Early constructionist approaches showed this neglected territory to be teeming with conventional form-meaning pairings, i.e., lexico-grammatical constructions. While corpora have been seen as a source for investigating these constructions, they entail a fundamental but seldom-noted limitation: constructions are constituted by both syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations, but corpora lack the paradigmatic dimension. Thus corpora can reveal multiword items but not the relations among them that constitute constructions. We elaborate on an alternative, illustrating how the design of an existing machine-readable language model affords discovery of lexico-grammatical constructions by capturing bottom up the relations they contract with other patterns. The network is noise-ridden, but we exploit the noise as the necessary background against which constructions can be set into relief and thus made discoverable.

Previous studies found that English figurative idioms alliterate at above chance levels. To permit estimation of amounts of surplus alliteration Gries (2011) calculated baseline levels using an analytic method. This article reports a follow-on investigation covering types of multiword unit (MWU) and types of interword, intraMWU phonological similarity (PhS) considered neither by Gries nor by an even earlier study. In contrast to Gries (2011), baseline levels of PhS were estimated using a stochastic method. In samples of figurative idioms upward departures from baseline levels – expressed as standardized effect sizes – ranged from small to medium for assonance, up to large for alliteration, and even larger for rhyme and alliteration-with-assonance. For samples of (relatively) non-idiomatic MWUs upward departures from baselines were generally small or, in the case of academic collocations, downward. The practicality of the stochastic method is discussed, as are a possible role of interword PhS in the conventionalization of word strings and possible roles of interword, intra-idiom PhS in oral communication. Overall, the findings are problematic for a non-usage-based theory but compatible with a cognitive linguistic theory in which motivation can operate entirely within the phonological pole of a MWU.

When students engage in a research community of practice they not only have to master academic register but also discourse features embodied in the research genre. This corpus-based study examines lexico-grammatical features and stance and engagement markers in 54 Catalan (Romance language) research reports in biology, from high school twelfth-graders and university master theses’ writers. These texts belong to the TARBUC corpus ( Treballs Acadèmics de Recerca de Batxillerat i Universitat en Català ) – Baccalaureate and University Academic Research Reports written in Catalan. Analyses reveal a statistically significant increase in syntactic complexity and lexical density in university writers. Furthermore, findings on interactional function indicate that marking of stance (i.e., hedges) correlates with a specific type of engagement marker (i.e., directive to argument) in university students’ texts. Self-mention is the most salient rhetorical strategy used by students, in line with the requirements of the research article published in this discipline. Finally, overall data on the distribution of interactional markers suggest that the conventions of the research article genre constrain interactional strategies from high school onwards. Results suggest that linguistic literacy, cognitive maturity and the genre’s social convention interact in a linked process in the development of a skilled writer.

This study examines the diachronic evolution of the polysemy of the Spanish verb sentir (‘to feel’) by means of a corpus-based dynamic behavioral profile (BP) analysis. Methodologically, it presents the first application of the BP approach to historical data and proposes some methodological innovations not only within the current body of research in historical semantics but also with regard to previous applications of the BP approach. First, whereas the majority of existing studies in quantitative historical semantics are largely based on observed frequencies or percentages of collocational co-occurrence, our study leverages more complex historical data that are based on the similarities of vectors. Second, this study also provides an extension of the methodological apparatus of the BP approach by complementing the traditional hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis (HAC) with a dynamic BP approach derived from multidimensional scaling maps (MDS). Theoretically, this methodology contributes to a comprehensive perspective on the process of Constructionalization and the nature of networks, which is illustrated on the basis of the development of the Discourse Marker (DM) lo siento (‘I’m sorry’).

This study analyzes English verb–particle constructions (VPC) in a learner and a native corpus of argumentative essays, focusing on two important factors: structural patterns of VPCs and preference for one-word verbs (e. g., delay vs. put off ). The results showed that while every structural type of VPC was significantly underused by L2 learners, greater underuse was observed with discontinuous transitive VPCs (e. g., bring it back ). In addition, the frequency of the most underused VPCs in the learner corpus was significantly lower than that of their one-word synonyms, indicating the learners’ strong preference for one-word verbs. Identifying these specific areas of difficulty when learning VPCs, the author explores how contrastive linguistic analyses and corpus-based quantitative approaches can collaboratively contribute to the investigation of complex interlanguage systems.