Volume 9, Issue 1

This study examines the extent to which complex inflectional patterns found in Turkish, a language with a rich agglutinating morphology, can be described as formulaic. It is found that many prototypically formulaic phenomena previously attested at the multi-word level in English – frequent co-occurrence of specific elements, fixed ‘bundles’ of elements, and associations between lexis and grammar – also play an important role at the morphological level in Turkish. It is argued that current psycholinguistic models of agglutinative morphology need to be complexified to incorporate such patterns. Conclusions are also drawn for the practice of Turkish as a Foreign Language teaching and for the methodology of Turkish corpus linguistics.

This article examines whether there are differences in the frequency of discourse markers (DMs) between Native English (NE) and Non-native English (NNE) corpora of political media discourse. Based on the grammatical-pragmatic perspective of discourse markers (Fraser, 2004), the discourse markers identified in the corpora were divided into four semantic categories: contrastive discourse markers (CDM), elaborative discourse markers (EDM), implicative discourse markers (IDM) and temporal discourse markers (TDM). The results revealed that: (i) in both corpora, implicative discourse markers (IDMs) and elaborative discourse markers (EDMs) have the lowest and highest frequency counts respectively, (ii) there are significant differences across the four types of discourse markers in both corpora, (iii) there is no significant difference in the aggregated frequency of discourse markers across NE and NNE political news discourse, and (iv) there are no relative NE/NNE frequency differences within each category of discourse markers. The findings point to the need for revisiting Kaplan's contrastive rhetoric, and provide evidence for the plausibility of a “ universal discourse competence” in advanced NNE written discourse.

The aim of this paper is to question the relevance of the complement-modifier distinction in Noun-Noun sequences. It will be argued that neither syntactic nor semantic criteria provide a completely reliable basis for the distinction between complement and modifier in the context of post-head complements or modifiers and even less so in the case of nominal complements or modifiers in pre-head position, i.e. in Noun-Noun sequences. More specifically, it will be contended that the distinction between complements and modifiers in Noun-Noun sequences cannot be held on cognitive grounds either. With this aim it will firstly be shown that there are different types of associations between the two nouns in Noun-Noun sequences, namely thematic-relation associations (e.g. food shopping) and peripheral associations (e.g. strip shopping). Secondly, evidence will be provided to show that, in spite of the fact that these various associations may correspond to our intuitions about the complement-modifier distinction, they manifest a similar degree of semantic bondedness and combination frequency. In order to measure the semantic bondedness and frequency of the different types of relations in Noun-Noun sequences a pilot study on a sample of Noun-Noun sequences will be conducted using corpus data. The relative frequency with which two nouns are combined correlates with different degrees of ‘semantic bonding’, which can be seen as a sign of cognitive relevance. As a result of this, it will be shown that, even in the case of relational nouns, the most frequent combinations are not always thematic-relation ones. In addition, some sequences where nouns are combined with other nouns denoting peripheral relations show a higher degree of semantic bonding than others in which they are combined with thematic-relation nouns. Finally, the distinction between complements and modifiers in Noun-Noun sequences will be addressed from the point of view of interpretation. In spite of the fact that thematic relation interpretations are assumed to have priority over property interpretations, this priority may be reversed by different factors.

It has been argued that referential pointing signs in signed languages (SLs) are linguistic signs of the grammatical class pronoun rather than pointing gestures. In support of the existence of pronouns in SLs, claims of a categorical nature have been made of the usage and form of pointing signs that are based on very limited datasets. In this paper I present data to show that many of these claims also do not align closely with relevant functional and formational characteristics of pointing signs from a corpus of Australian SL (Auslan) nor, potentially, with data from other SLs; or they appear to be equally true of the deictic (indexical) gestural points made in co-speech gesture by non-signers. I not only concur with ar-guments that these signs are actually blends of linguistic and gestural elements but also argue against analysing SL referen-tial points as members of the grammatical class pronoun.

This paper deals with the seemingly free competition between inflected and uninflected infinitives in Portuguese, a much-debated issue in Portuguese linguistics, which, however, has not been seriously empirically studied before. We specifically focus on Vesterinen's (2006, 2011) cognitive hypothesis according to which the inflected infinitive is used in cases in which the infinitival subject risks to be less cognitively accessible due to contextual reasons. We investigate this theory by analyzing both corpus and experimental (self-paced reading) data, making use of advanced linear modeling. We show that both types of analysis lead to complementary results: the inflected form primarily eases the processing of sentences with increased complexity. On the basis of these results, we argue that Vesterinen's accessibility account is but part of the solution for the inflected/non-inflected problem.