Volume 10, Issue 1

Previous research has shown that non-phonemic uses of glottalization are often prosodically determined in a variety of languages such as English, German, Polish, and Spanish. We examine the use of inserted glottalization in Hawaiian, a language that also has a phonemic glottal stop, to determine whether the distribution and realization of non-phonemic glottalization is conditioned by higher prosodic boundaries and/or prosodic prominence as found in other languages. The spontaneous speech data in this study comes from the Hawaiian-language radio program Ka Leo Hawaiʻi , which featured interviews with bilingual Hawaiian–English speakers in the 1970s and 1980s (Kimura, Larry (Producer). 2020. Ka Leo Hawaiʻi [radio program]. Kaniʻāina, the digital repository of Ka Haka ʻUla O Keʻelikōlani, College of Hawaiian Language, University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo. Available at: https://ulukau.org/kaniaina/). Results show that non-phonemic glottalization occurs most often before an unstressed, monophthongal single-vowel grammatical marker (/a e i o/), where it is also longer, as well as before unstressed vowels and between different flanking sounds. Full closures were more likely between identical vowels, but stress does not affect realization. These results are not consistent with the use of glottalization at higher prosodic boundaries or to mark prosodic prominence. Instead, the preponderance of non-phonemic glottalization before single-vowel grammatical markers may be to ensure that these critical markers are recoverable and not perceptually subsumed by the preceding vowel.

This paper proposes the principle of weakest epenthesis, whereby the quality of the epenthetic vowel is that of the weakest lexical vowel of the language, and weakness is defined phonologically, not phonetically. This principle is first shown to motivate the emergence of [e] as the epenthetic vowel of Modern Hebrew. It is then corroborated by a crosslinguistic survey of 100 languages. Finally, the Modern Hebrew facts are used to illustrate the formalization of this principle using gradient symbolic representations.

Phonotactic restrictions do not usually hold uniformly across the entire lexicon of a particular language, and thus the lexicon of a natural language is often assumed to consist of different sub-lexicons. A question that arises is how specific these sub-lexicons can be. A classic, conservative approach is to posit only broad distinctions, such as the distinction between native words versus borrowed words. An alternative approach is to posit more specific miniature lexicons, such as a set of morphemes that show a particular morpheme-specific pattern or a set of loanwords from a particular language. With this general theoretical issue in mind, this paper first points out that there are phonotactic restrictions that can cue a very specific class of words in Japanese; for example, geminate /ɾɾ/ occurs almost exclusively in loanwords from Italian. Building upon these novel observations, the current experiments tested whether Japanese speakers can infer specific sets of words such as “snack names”, “Italian restaurant names”, and “German names” based on particular phonotactic cues. The results of the two experiments support the idea that the lexicon of a natural language can consist of very specific sub-lexicons, at least going beyond the often posited native versus loanword distinction.

This paper is a methodological contribution outlining an approach we have developed to recording ultrasound tongue imaging and audio research data as part of public engagement work. The paper is based on our experience of recording in East Lancashire, UK, at two such events as well as building on the work of other colleagues who have conducted similar projects. We have successfully managed to collect relevant articulatory research data while providing an interesting and enjoyable event for the public. In a context of stretched research budgets and researcher time constraints, this combination allows a time-effective combination of tasks, whilst democratizing academic work and engaging local communities. Our paper has two aims: (i) to describe the logistical and ethical considerations for organizing an event combining articulatory research and public engagement, and (ii) to provide methodological reflection on data collection and eventual data quality obtained including assessment of background noise. We hope to provide inspiration and suggestions for colleagues wishing to pursue research in this area and also acknowledge where some of our methods would benefit from more effective solutions. Sample documents for ethics, publicity, risk assessments, staff planning, timelines, and budgeting are included in our supplementary material toolkit available at https://osf.io/ky3cz/.

Our study tests the acoustic fidelity of remote recordings, using a large variety of stimuli and recording environments. Remote recordings support crucial uses like reaching isolated populations and more speakers; however, it is important to be aware of any limitations therein. A 188-word list was constructed from each English consonant followed by each vowel. Words recorded by one male and one female speaker in a sound-attenuated booth were input for test recordings. Stimuli were played over an electronic speaker and recorded on six devices across five operating systems, four teleconferencing platforms, and two browsers, using internal and external microphones, a more extensive set than has been analyzed in prior research. Acoustic analysis investigates the impact of these recording configurations on fundamental frequency, loudness, and vowel formant measures. Across recording conditions, browser choice had less effect on the different vowel measures, while choice of hardware resulted in a greater number of significant differences and greater variability within and across conditions. Recording configuration effects were observed to exert different impacts across vowels and speakers, resulting in inconsistent perturbations. These results highlight the need for careful selection and detailed documentation of all recording configurations.

Previous eye-tracking studies suggest listeners closely track coarticulatory segmental information to facilitate spoken word recognition. In tonal languages such as Cantonese, the F0 value of high-level and rising tones is higher when preceding a low tone than preceding a high tone. Given the tonal coarticulation effect in Cantonese, this study used a printed-word version of the visual-world eye-tracking paradigm to investigate Macau Cantonese listeners’ real-time processing of coarticulatory information through two types of word pairings, in which target words and competitor words are either matched or mismatched in coarticulatory pattern (i.e., preceding a low or high tone). The results of the growth curve analysis on the difference between target and competitor fixations show that a fixation advantage of target words increases more quickly over time in the mismatch condition than in the match condition. The overall findings suggest that native listeners closely attend to the coarticulatory tonal information to facilitate lexical activation during moment-by-moment processing. Since the mechanisms of the coarticulatory effect may differ between segments and lexical tones, this research calls for further eye-tracking studies that manipulate coarticulation cues in segmental and suprasegmental domains.

Research on phonological learning has shown that adult learners are capable of effectively tracking regularities in phonological patterns. In our study, we investigated the dynamics of the learning process for regularity tracking. Adult learners participated in a phonological learning experiment where they acquired vowel harmony rules for forming plurals. The experiment had four conditions, varying in learning mode (goal-oriented vs. exploratory) and the locus of phonological regularity (phonotactics vs. alternation). When learners had no explicit learning goal and when the language involved random alternation patterns, their learning process showed a strong preference for regularity. This suggests that the application of statistical learning metrics is influenced by two factors: greater uncertainty in the exploratory conditions compared to the goal-oriented conditions, and a stronger inclination to avoid irregularities in alternation compared to phonotactics.

As social media use continues to increase its presence in our lives, so does the language of such platforms. One of the most salient features of social media discourse is the hashtag. Starting its life on Twitter (X) about 15 years ago, the hashtag has seeped from online to offline communication. Yet, it is not clear whether hashtags are words, tags, or something else altogether, nor is it clear what morphological process gives rise to them. This study presents an extensive analysis of 3,423 hashtags from 1,216 English-language tweets, each manually coded for various linguistics features, including position in the tweet, grammatical function, and syntactic integration. Our findings suggest that hashtags are extremely varied and we propose that they are indeed words, arising through a process of hashtagging (which is distinct from compounding). We also argue that some hashtags are syntactically integrated while others constitute parenthetical material.

Romance stem alternations have been argued to represent exclusively morphological objects (or “morphomes”) independent from semantic and syntactic categories. This conclusion has been based on feature-value analyses of the inflected forms, and definitions of natural classes that are theoretically driven and about which no consensus exists. Individual examples of morphomes are thus frequently challenged, while their autonomously morphological nature has never been tested quantitatively or experimentally. This is the purpose of the present study. We use context-based embeddings to explore the semantic profile of Spanish verb stem alternations. At the paradigmatic level, our findings suggest that Spanish morphomes’ cells are characterized by significantly above-chance distributional-semantic similarity. At the lexical level, similarly, verbs that show more similar patterns of alternation have also been found to be closer in meaning. Both of these findings suggest that these structures may have an extramorphological function. Using gradient distributional-semantic similarity offers a way to objectively assess the degree of (un)naturalness of a set of forms and meanings, something which has been lacking from most discussions on the structure of features and the architecture of paradigms.

This paper proposes two major modifications to previous analyses of the resultative V -de construction in Mandarin Chinese. First, while -de is argued to be prepositional in nature, it is shown at the same time that -de is different from other regular prepositions in that the former, but not the latter, undergoes head movement in a resultative. To reconcile these apparently conflicting observations, we propose to treat -de as the exponent of a prepositional categorizer. Second, we argue that a small clause analysis of the resultative V -de construction is not only conceptually motivated by the Direct Object Restriction but also empirically supported by the fact that it can participate in the bǎ alternation, as with constructions that are canonically assumed to contain a small clause.

Discussion of the theoretical underpinning of pseudo-passive constructions abounds in generative linguistics and comparative typology. However, the cognitive construal of and morphosyntactic acquisition of (un)grammatical English pseudo-passive constructions by Chinese-speaking L2-English users with different proficiency levels have never been investigated. It is worth examining whether proficiency level modulates constructional acceptability and cognitive construal, which would allow us to infer L2-English users’ morphosyntactic acquisition stages of pseudo-passive constructions. To fill this research gap, the study recruited 120 L2-English speakers with different levels of proficiency and 40 native English speakers to complete a grammaticality judgment test with an acceptance judgment scale from −2 to 2 for 40 ungrammatical pseudo-passive sentences and 40 fillers. Proficiency level significantly correlates with a firmer rejection of ungrammatical pseudo-passive sentences and cognitive construal which is more target-like. Significantly asymmetrical acceptance levels between two types of target ungrammatical constructions are also revealed for low ( p  = 0.002) and medium proficiency ( p  = 0.000) groups, demonstrating the type effect on grammaticality judgment and morphosyntactic acquisition.

This article provides an overview of linguistic strategies used in the incel community to deindividualize and dehumanize women. Among the most common ways of referring to women there is the use of generic labels ( Stacy , Becky ), conceptual metaphor ( warpig , landwhale ) including creative metaphorical morphology ( foid , femoid ), conceptual metonymy ( hole , extrahole ), and conceptual metaphtonymy ( roastie ). The consistent use of such terms within the incelosphere contributes to perpetuating harmful attitudes and potentially even justifying violent and abusive conduct towards women. For this reason, the language of dehumanization in general, and the misogynist discourse of incels in particular, warrants closer attention. This study is carried out within the methodological framework of cognitive semantics and adds to the expanding research on the discourse of the manosphere and the incelosphere.

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic turned into a global crisis. Focusing on the deterioration in people’s mental health, we conducted two experiments, one in Germany and one in the UK, in January and February 2021, when both countries were in lockdown. Using a COVID-19-themed sentence completion task, we tested the direction of counterfactual thoughts in relation to egocentric (self-focused) versus non-egocentric (other-focused) perspective-taking. Results show that in both samples, more upward counterfactuals (mental simulation of better counterfactual worlds, relating to negative emotions) than downward counterfactuals (mental simulation of worse counterfactual worlds, relating to positive emotions) were produced in the egocentric condition. An opposite pattern was found in the non-egocentric condition. We conclude that emotions as expressed in counterfactual language are perspective-dependent.

Conversational storytelling in doctor–patient interactions has become an important channel for doctors to understand patients’ experiences of health and illness. This study explores how storytelling is used as a resource to influence patient’s agency in history-taking, especially in the sequential development of elderly Chinese patients’ storytelling. The study draws on 39 conversations with four doctors and twelve elderly patients. Examples are selected from five contrasting extracts to see how elderly Chinese patients employ storytelling to reveal agency accomplished in doctor–patient interaction, especially among the patients’ orienting to the “sick role”. By specifying the agency engagement, this study also helps us appreciate that doctors should be encouraged to attend to patients’ storytelling and assert patients’ agency as ways to attend to their concerns and come to a deeper understanding of their conditions, to facilitate holistic medical encounters.

This article studies the category of conative animal calls (CACs) in a Cushitic variety – Macha Oromo (Ethiopia). The authors analyze the function (pragma-semantics) and form (phonetics and morphology) of 52 CACs collected during fieldwork activities and conclude the following: the category of CACs in Macha Orono largely complies with the prototype of a CAC posited recently in literature. Moreover, Macha Oromo data suggest a few novel generalizations (a close relationship between summonses and onomatopoeias, and between dispersals and motion-inciting/sustaining directionals, as well as a general preference for close I/U vowels) and raise a question regarding the validity of the hierarchy of semantic types of CACs proposed in some studies.

This paper presents the typologically unusual case of borrowed tense-mood-aspect morphemes. Data are taken from Louisiana Creole, a critically endangered French-lexifier creole. Over the course of its history, Louisiana Creole has been in contact with local varieties of both French and English, including African American English. It will be shown that points of structural congruity between Louisiana Creole and African American English have facilitated the borrowing of two aspect markers for speakers competent in both varieties. African American English stressed BIN has been borrowed and marks remote past habitual, stative, and completive. The adverb still has been borrowed and subsequently has grammaticalized as a continuative marker via spec-to-head reanalysis. These borrowings are integrated into the inflectional domain as functional heads marking aspect. Their ordering constraints are evaluated relative to a previous hierarchy proposed by Rottet. Discussion of contact-induced change in creole languages has typically been confined to examination of interactions with the lexifier, the language which contributes the majority of a creole’s vocabulary (in this case, French). Fewer studies have presented detailed accounts of how creoles behave when in contact with other languages, meaning that this particular contact context remains undertheorized.

In this study, we look at the distribution of silent pauses within existing multi-language corpora to see whether their location and duration correlate with clause boundaries. Our study is based on data of seven languages from Multi-CAST. We supplemented the original clause boundary annotations with information about silent pauses in order to investigate the alignment of clause boundaries and pausing. We find a gradient association between clause boundary strength and the probability of a pause and a two-way distinction for pause duration within clauses and at clause boundaries.

In the present paper, we discuss the bibliographical limits for commonplace typological studies and address how to estimate the resources available for an in-depth study using a full-text corpus of grammatical descriptions, considering different metalanguages, temporal stages of description, theoretical perspectives, and quality of grammatical descriptions. In a case study on motion, we illustrate the above perspectives and show how computer-assisted sampling using large-scale keyword searches for information-dense descriptions is a time-saving resource for the linguistic researcher to create genealogically independent samples. The measures discussed in this study allow for a better appraisal of the state of existing information for typological studies, but the problem of wider access to rare publications remains a significant challenge.

Ideophones stand out as promising constructions to be considered as linguistic “fossils”. Allegedly, this is due to some of their distinctive features, including their sound-symbolic nature, ample use of reduplication, reliance on the simplest combinatorial processes, attachment to emotional content, and presumed bootstrapping effects on language acquisition. These features might exhibit some continuity with primate communication systems, including the co-occurrence with gestures. Because the nature and complexity of ideophones in modern languages can vary significantly from culture to culture, in this paper, we focus on their links with cross-modality, and ultimately, on how they are processed by the brain and how our brain evolved. We embed our analysis in the framework of the human self-domestication hypothesis, according to which human evolution was characterized by a gradual decrease in reactive aggression, which had an impact on our cognitive and behavioural features. Our framework implicates the cortico-striatal brain networks, whose enhanced connectivity is a mechanism for both the suppression of reactive aggression, and for cross-modality and language processing more generally. In conclusion, even though present-day ideophones can certainly show many new complexities, some of their most basic features can be reconstructed as approximations of early (but not archaic), creative uses of language.

This article investigates grammatical aspect in Slavic and non-Slavic languages, starting from Slavic languages, by providing crosslinguistic evidence for the presence of the so-called concept-dependent default aspect. This line of research builds on and extends accounts that draw a parallel between the structure and semantics of aspect. I show that structural simplicity (relating to whether the imperfective or the perfective is the derivation base for the respective reverse form) corresponds to prominence in meaning. More precisely, I assume that (im)perfective basic morphological or syntactic representations are indicators for primary interpretations. By building upon existing studies in typology, I introduce typological homogeneity as a criterion for the establishment of a form-meaning (in Slavic morpho-semantic) relationship within (im)perfective realizations of a particular verbal concept. This criterion complements high frequency and preferred choice in associative experiments as properties of aspectual alpha-verbs. In this paper, I discuss typological homogeneity by using the primary example of verbs of evidence collection, also called reveal-type predicates, and by additionally discussing manner-of-speaking and speech act verbs. These novel data provide evidence of typological homogeneity in the aspectual representation.

We investigate the degree to which mispronounced signs can be accommodated by signers of French Sign Language (LSF). Using an offline judgment task, we examine both the individual contributions of three parameters – handshape, movement, and location – to sign recognition, and the impact of the individual features that were manipulated to obtain the mispronounced signs. Results indicate that signers judge mispronounced handshapes to be less damaging for well-formedness than mispronounced locations or movements. In addition to this macro-effect of parameter, individual features are found to carry different weights during sign recognition, mirroring what has been reported for phonological features in spoken languages. Together, these results thus further support an underlying a-modal phonological architecture for human language, including feature-based phonological representations.

The aim of this study is to examine the effects of translating literary metaphors from Serbian to English on metaphor quality, aptness, metaphoricity, and familiarity. The research involved 55 Serbian metaphors translated into English using the A is B form, which were then evaluated by 252 participants in two separate studies. Study 1 served as an extension of a previous norming study. In it, a group of participants assessed 55 translated literary metaphorical expressions, and their evaluations were compared to those of the original Serbian versions. In Study 2, a group of participants, divided into two subgroups, rated a collection of both the original metaphorical expressions and their translated counterparts. The results indicate that the translated metaphors generally scored higher in terms of aptness, familiarity, quality, and partially in metaphoricity. These findings suggest that translating the metaphors into English had a positive impact on their perceived effectiveness and familiarity. Several factors are considered to explain these outcomes, including the nature of the English language itself, the participants’ exposure to English, and the translation process. Overall, this study highlights the influence of translation on the perception of literary metaphors and provides insights into metaphor interpretation.

A growing body of research shows that readers and listeners are biased by the grammatical gender of a noun when making inferences about the gender of its referent. This result is central in debates about gender-fair language but has mostly been established using masculine generics. This paper presents two preregistered studies on French that aim to replicate this result but using a lesser-studied type of noun: generic hybrid nouns. These nouns can refer to both male and female individuals but are either masculine or feminine, depending on the noun (e.g. un talent ‘a talent’ and une vedette ‘a star’). The availability of both genders for hybrid nouns allows for a more comprehensive test of the effect of grammatical gender than permitted by masculine generics. Overall, the paper replicates the role of grammatical biases in gender inferences, with masculine hybrid nouns being judged as more likely to refer to male individuals as compared to feminine hybrid nouns. However the results did not reveal a symmetric bias for feminine nouns, which were interpreted as gender-neutral. But this latter result should be interpreted with caution as it could be due to uncontrolled effects of gender stereotypes coming from the specific stimuli used in the study.

Previous research has demonstrated that dependencies between reflexives and their licensors resist attraction effects from structurally illicit but feature-matching attractors. However, mechanisms guiding reflexive licensing in control clauses remain insufficiently explored. To address this gap, this paper examines whether reflexives in adjunct control clauses primarily seek their licensors within the same clause (i.e., from the null subject) or access noun phrases in higher clauses by probing attraction effects from attractors in the higher clauses. The licensing of the null subject is dependent on the animacy requirement of the main clause subject. Therefore, if the reflexive searches for its licensor from the higher clause, the gender manipulation of noun phrases in the higher clause should exclusively impact the reflexive processing, not the null subject licensing. A self-paced reading task reveals that the licensing of reflexives is sensitive to attraction effects, but only when the overall gender feature of the main clause subject is complex. This finding suggests that reflexives in adjunct control clauses do not exclusively rely on the null subject as a licensor; instead, they extend their search beyond the local domain of the adjunct clause, using gender cues. The observed selective attraction effects support the notion that the distinctiveness of the main clause subject matters.

This study employed eye-tracking technology to examine how English as a foreign language learners at different proficiency levels process L1-glossed words and how this processing relates to L2 reading comprehension. Forty-seven university students were divided into a higher-proficiency group ( n  = 23) and a lower-proficiency group ( n  = 24) based on their L2 proficiency. Both groups were asked to read an English passage with L1 (Chinese) glosses. Their eye movements were recorded with an eye-tracker as they read. After reading, they were immediately given a reading comprehension test. Analyses of the eye-tracking data showed that the higher-proficiency L2 learners spent more time on unfamiliar words than the lower-proficiency L2 learners. Furthermore, lower-proficiency L2 learners’ longer processing time on glossed unfamiliar words was related to their higher reading comprehension scores, whereas this relationship was not found in the higher-proficiency group. These results revealed that the contribution of L1 glosses to L2 reading comprehension performance varied across L2 learners’ proficiency levels. Our findings have important implications for second language instruction.

Language learning in the extramural digital (ED) context has recently gained momentum because it focuses on second language (L2) learners’ autonomous, unstructured, online learning activities beyond the classroom. Drawing upon Dörnyei’s L2 motivational self system (including the ideal L2 self, ought-to L2 self, and L2 learning experience) to operationalize L2 learners’ motivational mindsets, this study aims to investigate whether L2 English learners’ ought-to L2 self can be translated into their ideal L2 self and predict learning behaviors within the ED context. Survey data from 310 undergraduate students in a top-tier Chinese university were collected and analyzed following a structural equation modeling approach. The results indicate that participants’ ought-to L2 self can facilitate the development of their ideal L2 self only through the full mediation effect of the L2 learning experience in the ED environment. Also, while students’ ought-to L2 self cannot directly predict their motivated learning behaviors in the ED context, there exists a significant indirect impact through the joint mediation of the L2 learning experience and ideal L2 self. These findings contribute to the ongoing conversation about L2 motivational dynamics by unveiling the conversion and interaction of different L2 motivational forces in digital and out-of-class settings.

Recent findings show adult New Zealanders who do not speak te reo Māori (the Māori language, the indigenous language of New Zealand) nonetheless have impressive implicit lexical and phonotactic knowledge of the language. These findings have been interpreted as showing that regular ambient exposure to a non-native language develops an implicit “proto-lexicon”, a memory store of lexical forms in that language, without any meaning. However, what is not known is the timeframe over which this knowledge is acquired. Does the knowledge stem exclusively from implicit learning during childhood, or does it continue to grow based on exposure during adulthood? To investigate this question, we directly compare non-Māori-speaking school-aged adolescents and adults in New Zealand and explore how age affects the degree of observed knowledge. Our results show that ambient exposure leads to implicit knowledge both in childhood and adulthood, and that continuing exposure throughout the lifespan leads to increased knowledge.

This article explores for the first time the relationship between occupational complexity (operationalized using the complexity measures indicated in the Dictionary of occupational titles ) and adult migrants’ second language (L2) sociolinguistic repertoires in the Austro-Bavarian naturalistic context. We analyze the data of 36 adult migrant L2 German speakers who participated in a virtual reality experiment involving interactions with a dialect-speaking and standard German-speaking interlocutor, the goal being to capture participants’ interpersonal varietal behavior, that is, their addressee-relational, differential use of standard German, Austro-Bavarian dialect, and mixture varieties. Bayesian multinomial mixed-effects models reveal that participants with occupations requiring more handling and physical precision work are predicted to employ dialect varieties more often, but exclusively in interaction with the standard German-speaking interlocutor. A person-centered visual-quantitative analysis additionally facilitates insights concerning which migrants deviate most notably from group-level patterns, and how these deviations may relate to the complexity of their primary occupation. More generally, this study paves new ground with respect to how we can operationally define and capture the complexity of occupational status, and moreover sets out a new direction for research questions investigating how career-related differences impact on (L2) language variation and use.

This exploratory study conducted an acoustic analysis of conversational speech produced by three-year-old children who are bilingual in Cantonese and English, as well as of children who are monolingual in one of those languages. Three fundamental frequency features of speech (mean F0, pitch sigma, and F0 range) were measured and compared between the bilingual and monolingual children, as well as within the bilingual children’s two languages. The results demonstrate significant individual variations. Some of the bilingual children exhibited differential F0 features in both languages, while others did not. Language dominance also emerges. In their dominant language Cantonese, the bilingual children produced the F0 patterns the same way as monolingual Cantonese children, whereas in their nondominant language English, the F0 features were different from those of monolingual English children. The findings suggest that three-year-old bilingual children have started developing distinct prosodic patterns for their two languages. However, achieving full command of prosody in both languages remains a prolonged process.

Variationist sociolinguistic methodology is grounded in the principle of accountability, which requires researchers to identify all of the contexts in which a given variable occurs or fails to occur. For morphosyntactic, lexical, and discourse variables, this process is notoriously time- and labor-intensive, as researchers manually sift through raw data in search of tokens to analyze. In this article, we demonstrate the usability of pretrained computational language models to automatically identify tokens of sociolinguistic variables in raw text. We focus on two English-language variables from different linguistic domains: intensifier choice (lexical; e.g., she is { very, really, so } smart ) and complementizer selection (morphosyntactic; e.g., they thought { that , Ø} I understood ). Text classifiers built with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) achieve high precision and recall metrics for both variables, even with relatively little hand-annotated training data. Our findings suggest that computational language models can dramatically reduce the burden of preparing data for variationist analysis. Furthermore, by inspecting the classifiers’ scores for individual sentences, researchers can observe patterns that should be written into the description of the variable context for further study.

This study employs a quantitative analytical descriptive approach to explore the attitudes of two Jordanian communities toward code-switching (CS). The first community lives in the United States (a migrant community), while the second community resides in Jordan (a native community). Data were collected using an online questionnaire and the attitudes of these two communities were compared with respect to their sense of identity, religion, communication efficiency, and audience design. The study also examines the influence of self-perceived language proficiency, the direction of CS, and gender on the positivity or negativity of individuals’ attitudes toward CS. The study pays particular attention to the use of CS as a polite or impolite behavior in different contexts. The findings of this study indicate that both groups have relatively similar attitudes toward CS in terms of communication efficiency, topic, audience design, and politeness. However, the migrant community has an overall more positive attitude toward CS in terms of religion and sense of identity, particularly when language proficiency is taken into account.

Access to languages is a human right and multilingual crisis communication is vital during a pandemic. Multilingual and (super)diverse Singapore features four official languages (English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil), with English being a dominant lingua franca. Additionally, other minority/migrant languages are also spoken to varying degrees (e.g. Tagalog, Thai, Burmese, Hindi, Punjabi, and Nepali). Contributing to public health communication research, this study explores Singapore’s multilingual pandemic communication practices evidenced on its COVID-related linguistic landscape, drawing on real-world top-down and bottom-up signs ( N  = 128). Top-down signs in Singapore are found to mostly feature English monolingualism or the four official languages. In comparison, Singapore’s bottom-up COVID-scape manifests in more scenarios. The findings are aligned with Singapore’s linguistic policy and existing pre-COVID linguistic ecology. What is conspicuously absent is that minority/migrant languages other than the four official languages are rarely represented. Despite Singapore's relative success in the anti-Covid journey overall, this raises questions of inclusiveness and accessibility and suggests that the city state needs to get out of its linguistic “comfort zone” and use a broader range of languages in crisis communication, especially considering the possibility of disease X and other future public health contingencies. The wider significance and ramifications of the study are also explored and discussed.

This paper aims to quantify distances between varieties of Mandarin (diachronic, regional, and situational) as a function of the similarity in the choice between syntactic variants in the Mandarin theme-recipient alternation ( yŭ / gěi dative alternation). We use a novel corpus-based method, Variation-Based Distance and Similarity Modeling, which draws inspiration from work in comparative sociolinguistics and quantitative dialectometry. Analysis reveals that, while there is a relatively stable probabilistic grammar across the investigated varieties, historical varieties do exhibit a relatively higher degree of heterogeneity than synchronic varieties. Despite the overall high similarity of the latter, we identify substantial probabilistic differences between fictional writings of Modern Mainland Mandarin and all other synchronic varieties. Our findings thus provide evidence in support of the hypothesis that the transition from Early Mandarin to Modern Mandarin over the past two centuries has witnessed salient grammatical shifts and also empirically demonstrate the interaction between genre variability and regional variability in Modern Mandarin.

This study explores the intricate interplay of linguistic ideologies, market dynamics, and linguistic habitus within the context of English language education in China. Analysis of Chinese English language teachers’ (CELTs) discourse on linguistic insecurity reveals a strong association between accentedness and incompetence, as well as between nativeness and teacher expertise. Despite dissatisfaction with nativeness-oriented criteria prevalent in the field, most CELTs reported experiencing anxiety due to the social stigma surrounding Mandarin-accented English. While certain Inner Circle English varieties are viewed as the most valuable capital, local and other non-Inner Circle varieties are considered the least valuable. Notably, Mandarin-accented English gains higher symbolic value than other perceived nonstandard English varieties beyond the teaching domain. This pricing mechanism within China’s English language teaching (ELT) landscape deviates from the price formation model of world Englishes proposed in previous work, which assigns a greater value to Outer Circle varieties than Expanding Circle varieties. By contextualizing CELTs’ experiences within broader language policies, this study illustrates how national interests, beyond the influence of Inner Circle publishers, intensify native-speakerism in China’s ELT market, thus emphasizing the intricate nature of explaining nuanced pricing patterns in the autonomous market within Expanding Circle contexts.

Historical revisionism towards the Yugoslavian experience of real socialism is gaining ground in Croatia and Slovenia, as exemplified, for example, by the 2017 renaming of Zagreb’s Marshal Tito Square and similar cases in Šibenik or Karlovac, as well as parallel developments in Ljubljana. However, the spaces that once represented the Yugoslavian workers’ movement and the anti-fascist struggle can be also subject to nostalgic practices termed Titostalgia. This study employs an analysis inspired by a discourse-historical approach to scrutinize the arguments used in naming controversies in nine Croatian and Slovenian localities from 2011 to 2022. The investigation of semiotic landscapes draws from extensive fieldwork, including photographic documentation consisting of 1,658 images. Dystopian interpretations of Yugoslavia’s past turn out to be propagated through top–down discourses, circulating in media outlets and endorsed by local authorities through infrastructural signage. These discourses are typically initiated by civil society actors aligned with right and far right politics. Besides mild media opposition, which mainly invokes anti-fascist values, smaller urban centres exhibit passive resistance or inertia towards the renaming, observable in grassroots signage. Conversely, capital cities emerge as hubs of intense expressive and predominantly progressive ideological semiotic practices within the renamed spaces.

This paper proposes a novel use of grammatical error detection/correction (GED/GEC) tools to document non-standard English varieties. This is motivated by the fact that both GED/GEC technology and sociolinguistics aim to identify linguistic deviation from the so-called standard, yet there has been little communication between the two fields. We thus investigate whether state-of-the-art GED/GEC models can be effectively repurposed to automatically detect dialectal differences and assist linguistic missions in this regard. We explore this in the context of written Singaporean English (Cambridge Write & Improve), and spoken Vietnamese English (CanVEC), representing an established non-standard variety (Case 1) and an emerging variety (Case 2), respectively. We find that our GED/GEC systems are able to successfully detect a number of both established and new features. We further highlight some of the remaining areas that the systems overlook, as well as opportunities for future developments. This research bridges the gap between GED/GEC and dialectology, emphasizing their shared theme of linguistic deviation from a socially defined standard.

We present a new paradigm investigating social meaning through strategic action. More precisely, we present an experimental technique (a textual role-playing game developed with the Ren’Py engine), which we view as an enrichment of the matched-guise technique (MGT). In this paradigm the explicit response scales of the MGT are substituted for strategic choices in a video game. We argue that studying social meaning experimentally through looking at its effects on participants’ actions is more interactive than the classic paradigm. We compare the results from both the video game and a more classic version of the paradigm based on scales, conducted with the same linguistic materials, and we show that researchers who use only the MGT may be missing some crucial aspects of the social meanings of the linguistic phenomena they are studying. We also argue that a paradigm based on strategic action is better equipped to study the social, political, and economic outcomes for the users of those linguistic variants, and therefore to contribute to understanding phenomena like linguistic discrimination.

Whilst linguistic research on speakers of minority genders has increased in the past decade, much less is known about how they can best be included in broader (socio)linguistic research. The current paper compares the way a range of five different gender measures for survey research are filled out and evaluated by a sample of LGBTQ+ people (N = 682). It finds that providing a larger range of answering options allows researchers to gain a better view of the gender diversity in their sample, whilst preventing refusals and loss of participants. The gender question that was least likely to be refused and was rated the most accurate, most inclusive, and clearest was a six-option multiple-choice question which included a “prefer not to say” and a write-in option. This question reconciles two competing interests in the treatment of queer data: it explicitly recognizes and names minority genders and simultaneously carves out space for participants to refuse categorization or write out gender identities beyond those preset by the researcher.

Despite the burgeoning interest in the linguistic construction of localized hip hop identities, rhyming practices, an essential component of the genre, remain underexplored. Conversely, phonological studies interpret imperfect rhyming in hip hop as evidence of rappers’ implicit knowledge of a stable linguistic system. Drawing on both strands of research, this study examines how Chinese rappers enhance the perceptual rhymability of prescriptively imperfect rhymes and how these strategies embody rappers’ agentive efforts at glocalizing hip hop and reflect broader sociolinguistic changes in China. The dataset comprises 369 instances of monolingual (Chinese, English) or crosslinguistic (English-Chinese) imperfect rhymes, drawn from a rap competition show. Results suggest that a majority of monolingual Chinese imperfect rhyme sets adhere to the rhyming schemes in traditional folk arts, while numerous monolingual English and English-Chinese imperfect rhyme sets align with Zwicky’s Rock Rhyme framework derived from English rock lyrics. Additionally, we identified two other strategies originating from the phonological features of (1) Southern Mandarin and (2) Chinese-accented English, both of which are prominent linguistic influences in contemporary Chinese society. This study explores rap music’s fundamental linguistic device in the process of glocalization and develops an analytical paradigm for both monolingual and crosslinguistic rhyming practices.

The COVID-19 pandemic touched every corner of the globe, even impacting the sphere of linguistics in terms of communication, lexis, and how linguists conduct their research. However, Rusyn, a minority language in Ukraine’s Transcarpathian region, took advantage of this period in a new attempt at revitalization. Rusyn is spoken in several European countries and has the privilege of being recognized and protected in most of them. Ukraine does not, however, consider Rusyn to be a language, and, therefore, does not protect it. There have been several movements for recognition and autonomy in the past, but all have been unsuccessful. The pandemic gave this small community of speakers a new chance to elevate their work towards boosting the language’s vitality and status through digital platforms such as YouTube and collective writing projects. This paper looks at the before-and-after of the pandemic in relation to Rusyn in Transcarpathia, focusing on the shift in digital approaches to protecting and promoting the language. It concludes that, in fact, a shift has occurred in terms of utilizing digital media in order to promote the language.

Speech errors provide cues for explaining the process of word retrieval. For example, speech errors are less likely to occur with high-frequency words since these words already receive a high level of activation. The current analysis further develops existing findings in two ways. First, instead of considering the overall frequency of the words in the entire corpora, we consider the gap in frequency between sequential pairs of words. We hypothesize that speech errors are more likely to occur if the target has a much lower frequency than its preceding word. Second, we use word embedding methods to quantify the semantic distance between sequential pairs of words. We hypothesize that speech errors are more likely to occur with words that have a large semantic distance from their preceding context. We also consider the potential effects of phonetic distance between sequential pairs of words and position-in-utterance of words in utterances. The results from a Mandarin corpus of speech errors show that word frequency and semantic distance between sequential pairs of words can be used to predict the occurrence of speech errors with an accuracy above the majority baseline.

In this paper, I use methods from corpus linguistics and computer vision to find candidates for continuers  – that is, conversational markers that signal comprehension and encouragement to the primary speaker/signer to continue – in a corpus of Swedish Sign Language (STS). Using different methods based on distributional patterns in conversational turns, I identify a small set of manual signs – particularly the sign JA@ub ‘yes’ – that exhibit the characteristics associated with continuers, such as occurring frequently in repeated sequences of overlapping but noncompetitive turns. The identified signs correspond to those found in previous research on manual backchannels in STS, demonstrating that quantitative, distribution-based approaches are successful in identifying continuers. In a second step, I employ methods from computer vision to analyze a subset of the corpus videos, and find that the continuer candidates show interesting form characteristics: they are small in visible articulation and thus conversationally unobtrusive by often being articulated low and with little movement in signing space. The results show that distribution-based approaches can be used successfully with sign language corpus data, and that the nature of continuers exhibits similarities across modalities of human language.

In this article, we investigate if conversational priming in repetitional responses could be a factor in language change. In this mechanism, an interlocutor responds to an utterance by the other interactant using a repetitional response. Due to comprehension-to-production priming, the interlocutor producing the repetitional response is more likely to employ the same linguistic variant as the interlocutor producing the original utterance, resulting in a double exposure to the variant which, in turn, is assumed to reinforce the original priming effect, making the form more familiar to the repeating interlocutor. An agent-based model, with interactions shaped as conversations, shows that when conversational priming is added as a parameter, interlocutors converge faster on their linguistic choices than without conversational priming. Moreover, we find that when an innovative form is in some way favoured over another form (replicator selection), this convergence also leads to faster spread of innovations across a population. In a second simulation, we find that conversational priming is, under certain assumptions, able to overcome the conserving effect of frequency. Our work highlights the importance of including the conversation level in models of language change that link different timescales.

Grounded language processing is a crucial component in many artificial intelligence systems, as it allows agents to communicate about their physical surroundings. State-of-the-art approaches typically employ deep learning techniques that perform end-to-end mappings between natural language expressions and representations grounded in the environment. Although these techniques achieve high levels of accuracy, they are often criticized for their lack of interpretability and their reliance on large amounts of training data. As an alternative, we propose a fully interpretable, data-efficient architecture for grounded language processing. The architecture is based on two main components. The first component comprises an inventory of human-interpretable concepts learned through task-based communicative interactions. These concepts connect the sensorimotor experiences of an agent to meaningful symbols that can be used for reasoning operations. The second component is a computational construction grammar that maps between natural language expressions and procedural semantic representations. These representations are grounded through their integration with the learned concepts. We validate the architecture using a variation on the CLEVR benchmark, achieving an accuracy of 96 %. Our experiments demonstrate that the integration of a computational construction grammar with an inventory of interpretable grounded concepts can effectively achieve human-interpretable grounded language processing in the CLEVR environment.

Against the backdrop of the sociolinguistic-typological complexity debate which is all about measuring, comparing and explaining language complexity, this article investigates how Kolmogorov-based information theoretic complexity relates to linguistic structures. Specifically, the linguistic structure of text which has been compressed with the text compression algorithm gzip will be analysed. One implementation of Kolmogorov-based language complexity is the compression technique (Ehret, Katharina. 2021. An information-theoretic view on language complexity and register variation: Compressing naturalistic corpus data. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory (2). 383–410) which employs gzip to measure language complexity in naturalistic text samples. In order to determine what type of structures compression algorithms like gzip capture, and how these compressed strings relate to linguistically meaningful structures, gzip ’s lexicon output is retrieved and subjected to an in-depth analysis. As a case study, the compression technique is applied to the English version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its lexicon output is extracted. The results show that gzip -like algorithms sometimes capture linguistically meaningful structures which coincide, for instance, with lexical words or suffixes. However, many compressed sequences are linguistically unintelligible or simply do not coincide with any linguistically meaningful structures. Compression algorithms like gzip thus crucially capture purely formal structural regularities. As a consequence, information theoretic complexity, in this context, is a linguistically agnostic, purely structural measure of regularity and redundancy in texts.

This paper explores how linguistic data annotation can be made (semi-)automatic by means of machine learning. More specifically, we focus on the use of “contextualized word embeddings” (i.e. vectorized representations of the meaning of word tokens based on the sentential context in which they appear) extracted by large language models (LLMs). In three example case studies, we assess how the contextualized embeddings generated by LLMs can be combined with different machine learning approaches to serve as a flexible, adaptable semi-automated data annotation tool for corpus linguists. Subsequently, to evaluate which approach is most reliable across the different case studies, we use a Bayesian framework for model comparison, which estimates the probability that the performance of a given classification approach is stronger than that of an alternative approach. Our results indicate that combining contextualized word embeddings with metric fine-tuning yield highly accurate automatic annotations.

The International Distributed Little Red Hen Lab, usually called “Red Hen Lab” or just “Red Hen”, is dedicated to research into multimodal communication. In this article, we introduce the Red Hen Audio Tagger (RHAT), a novel, publicly available open source platform developed by Red Hen Lab. RHAT employs deep learning models to tag audio elements frame by frame, generating metadata tags that can be utilized in various data formats for analysis. RHAT seamlessly integrates with widely used linguistic research tools like ELAN: the researcher can use RHAT to tag audio content automatically and display those tags alongside other ELAN annotation tiers. RHAT additionally complements existing Red Hen pipelines devoted to natural language processing, speech-to-text processing, body pose analysis, optical character recognition, named entity recognition, computer vision, semantic frame recognition, and so on. These cooperating Red Hen pipelines are research tools to advance the science of multimodal communication.

This study, as one of the first in its kind, focuses on code-switching in computer-mediated communication (CMC) among Gen Z Japanese Americans who have been simultaneous bilinguals since childhood. We collected a dataset of 1,561 online text messages that were exchanged between these bilinguals and found intriguing code-switching patterns not typically observed in spontaneous speech nor reported in the literature. First, we find a surprisingly high portion of Japanese usage in the dataset and noticed high occurrences of Japanese auxiliary verbs and low occurrences of Japanese pronouns compared to the English counterparts. The data suggests these bilinguals have a strong grasp of both languages and are actively code-switching to construct their bilingual and bicultural identity over text. Second, our data shows that preferences for a type of code-switching (intra-sentential or inter-sentential) when texting friends are not a reflection of language proficiency or constraints of the CMC medium, but rather reflect the frequency with which the speakers orally code-switch and speak the embedded language at home. Moreover, we observe the speakers’ development of a CMC style of Japanese-English code-switching through using romanized Japanese words, elongating Japanese words using romanization, mixing writing scripts, and writing English words in Japanese characters.

When an English word ending in a stop is adapted to Korean, a vowel is variably inserted after the final stop: some words always take the epenthetic vowel, and some never do, while some vary between these alternatives. Although there are different linguistic factors that possibly affect this insertion, it is not easy to determine which pattern will be chosen if a new word comes into the borrowing language. This study conducted classification data analyses of production patterns based on machine learning algorithms including support vector machines and random forests. These two classifiers show similar results where vowel tenseness is the best predictor among all the possible predictors. This indicates that vowel tenseness is most influential in classifying the patterns (no vowel insertion, optional vowel insertion, or vowel insertion). Results suggest that while vowel tenseness remains significant, other factors such as stop voicing and stop place also hold some importance, albeit to a lesser degree. The contribution of this study is that it provides insight into the factors that regulate vowel insertion, and these findings support the need for a behavioral experiment to see if the current results can make right predictions with respect to the behavior of nonce items.

We present Bed Word, a tool leveraging industrial automatic speech recognition (ASR) to transcribe sociophonetic data. While we find lower accuracy for minoritized English varieties, the resulting vowel measurements are overall very close to those derived from human-corrected gold data, so fully automated transcription may be suitable for some research purposes. For purposes requiring greater accuracy, we present a pipeline for human post-editing of automatically generated drafts, which we show is far faster than transcribing from scratch. Thus, we offer two ways to leverage ASR in sociolinguistic research: full automation and human post-editing. Augmenting the DARLA tool developed by Reddy and Stanford (2015b. Toward completely automated vowel extraction: Introducing DARLA. Linguistics Vanguard 1(1). 15–28), we hope that this resource can help speed up transcription for sociophonetic research.

Scholars have yet to establish a consensus regarding French equivalents of the English present perfect (PP). This study investigates the French equivalents of the PP through the lens of parallel corpora. Although the passé composé is commonly considered the French equivalent, no singular tense in French entirely mirrors the PP. This paper challenges this assumption by suggesting other French forms as viable correspondences, including the présent de l’indicatif , the passé récent , the futur antérieur , and the imparfait . Leveraging the benefits of parallel corpora for crosslinguistic analysis, these forms were scrutinized in relation to their function and application across different uses of the PP. The findings provide empirical evidence that enriches the understanding of the crosslinguistic complexity between the PP and its French equivalents, offering valuable insights for foreign language learning, teaching, and translation. The study also stresses the importance of interpretations of tense equivalences in the pursuit of successful crosslinguistic communication.

The advancement of automated essay scoring (AES) is pivotal in alleviating the burdens on educators and ensuring fair and reliable writing assessments. While deep neural networks have enhanced AES accuracy, they frequently encounter challenges in capturing comprehensive contextual features and achieving generalizability across multiple dimensions of writing quality. To address these limitations, we propose GCNs-MTL+Multi-Level Features, a novel integration of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) with the pretrained BERT model and multi-task learning (MTL). Our proposed approach significantly enriches essay representation fidelity by incorporating both word-level and sentence-level features, thereby enhancing transparency and improving the robustness and accuracy of writing evaluations across holistic and analytic rating scales. By sharing representations across AES tasks, GCNs-MTL+Multi-Level Features streamlines the evaluation process, establishing a new benchmark in multidimensional writing assessments.

Sociolinguistics researchers can use sociolinguistic auto-coding (SLAC) to predict humans’ hand-codes of sociolinguistic data. While auto-coding promises opportunities for greater efficiency, like other computational methods there are inherent concerns about this method’s fairness – whether it generates equally valid predictions for different speaker groups. Unfairness would be problematic for sociolinguistic work given the central importance of correlating speaker groups to differences in variable usage. The current study examines SLAC fairness through the lens of gender fairness in auto-coding Southland New Zealand English non-prevocalic /r/. First, given that there are multiple, mutually incompatible definitions of machine learning fairness, I argue that fairness for SLAC is best captured by two definitions (overall accuracy equality and class accuracy equality) corresponding to three fairness metrics. Second, I empirically assess the extent to which SLAC is prone to unfairness; I find that a specific auto-coder described in previous literature performed poorly on all three fairness metrics. Third, to remedy these imbalances, I tested unfairness mitigation strategies on the same data; I find several strategies that reduced unfairness to virtually zero. I close by discussing what SLAC fairness means not just for auto-coding, but more broadly for how we conceptualize variation as an object of study.

Research on hashtag popularity presumes hashtag popularity to be correlated with its semantics and lexical clarity, and the popularity of its topic. However, within a single event, hashtags of identical stances can have contrasting popularity; one may attribute this to the assumption that a certain type of hashtag is preferred, but hashtags of identical syntactic format can also have contradictory popularity across events. We theorize that a hashtag’s popularity is heavily impacted by whether there are preexisting popular hashtags of similar syntactic format within the language.

Existing research has recognized the important role of translanguaging in linguistic education. Recent studies have begun to turn attention to translanguaging practices on social media. This study contributes to this growing body of literature by examining translanguaging strategies and functions deployed by Chinese doctoral students studying abroad on the social media platform Little Red Book. A netnography approach and computer-mediated discourse analysis are combined to analyze the data. The findings reveal that Chinese doctoral students employ various translanguaging strategies online, including multilingual, multi-semiotic, and multimodal strategies, to achieve a range of pragmatic functions. The multilingual strategy consists of using Chinese characters, English words or phrases, English abbreviations, English acronyms, Chinese pinyin acronyms, and Chinese pinyin initials; the multi-semiotic strategy involves the use of emojis and hashtags; while the multimodal strategy incorporates photos. The study also explores the motivations behind the use of translanguaging on social media by these students. The results indicate that social media provides translanguaging space for Chinese doctoral students studying abroad to creatively make full use of their linguistic repertoire. In doing so, they are able to demonstrate their doctoral identities, their socialization abilities, and attitudes of language playfulness.

Conceptual metaphors are one of many linguistic devices that can potentially encode and reinforce gender stereotypes. However, little is known about how metaphors encode gender stereotypes, and in previous literature the concept of “gendered metaphor” has been mostly assumed rather than attested. We take the first step to tackle this issue by examining the gender typicality of specific metaphorical source domains. In the present paper, we conducted three rating experiments ( N total  = 1,060 English-speaking participants) to determine the genderedness of 50 keywords associated with five frequently used source domains ( building, competition, journey, plant, and war ). We found that keywords associated with three source domains ( building, competition, and war ) were viewed as more masculine, while keywords associated with the source domains of journey and plant were viewed as more feminine. These data offer empirical verification for gendered perceptions of keywords associated with some frequently used source domains. The result also provides the first evidence that metaphors could encode gender stereotypes by selection of source domains.

Crossmodal correspondence refers to the phenomenon in which individuals match stimulus features (e.g., auditory pitch) with different sensory modalities (e.g., visual size). While studies on correspondences exhibited by suprasegmentals have mostly focused on pitch-size and pitch-shape associations, audiospatial binding observed in the production and perception of Mandarin tones, where pitch of the syllable distinguishes word meanings, sheds light on the symbolic potential of auditory pitch. In the present study, a forced-choice mapping task was conducted in the form of a word guessing game, where native Mandarin listeners select the meaning of an auditory “alien” word from two visual motions. The results showed that: (1) listeners reliably match auditory tones with visual motions in the way that pitch trajectories are congruent with spatial movements, (2) vowel category impacts tone-motion correspondence when syllables are articulated in non-contour tones, and (3) the capacities in driving the tone-motion correspondence are different across tonal categories. These findings further contribute to our understanding of the sound symbolic potential of lexical tones and expand the boundary of crossmodal correspondence that can be demonstrated by pitch.