Volume 8, Issue 1

This study examines conscious judgments of perceptual similarity between foreign and native structures, focusing on vowel epenthesis following coda stops in English nonwords borrowed into Korean. In a similarity judgment experiment, Korean listeners heard a triplet consisting of an English stop-final form and two Korean forms, one ending in a stop and one ending in stop-vowel; then they indicated which of the two Korean forms the English form sounded more similar to. This study investigated six different predictors: release, voicing and place of coda stop, vowel tenseness, final stress, and word length. Similarity judgment choices showed that Korean CVCV is judged as more similar to English CVC than Korean CVC when the English final stop is released or dorsal or when the English word is monosyllabic. Although this result confirms that stop release is indeed a major factor explaining vowel insertion in this context, no effects of stop voicing and vowel tenseness are not compatible with the perceptual similarity hypothesis, which is surprising since they have been previously argued to involve acoustic cues affecting L2 speech perception. These findings support the need for further research that concentrates more on direct perception rather than judgments of perceptual similarity.

Sound symbolism, systematic and iconic relationships between sounds and meanings, is now a topic that is very actively explored by linguists, psychologists and cognitive scientists. As a new research strategy to study the nature of sound symbolic connections across different languages, a number of scholars have started using Pokémon names, a research paradigm that is now dubbed “Pokémonastics.” The previous Pokémonastics studies have experimentally explored how the evolution status is symbolically expressed by native speakers of English, Japanese and Brazilian Portuguese. Building on these studies, the current experiment examined the sound symbolic knowledge of Russian speakers, and found that they are more likely to associate large, post-evolution Pokémon characters with names containing voiced obstruents than with names containing voiceless obstruents, and that they are also more likely to associate post-evolution characters with names containing [a] than with names containing [i]. The experiment also revealed that Russian speakers are less likely to associate post-evolution characters with names having labial consonants than with names having coronal or dorsal consonants. Overall, the current results show that Russian speakers generally have knowledge of sound symbolic associations that is similar to that of English, Japanese and Brazilian Portuguese speakers, suggesting that some sound symbolic patterns hold robustly across multiple languages.

Idiosyncratic perceptual compensation behaviors are considered to have a bearing on the perceptual foundation of sound change. We investigate how compensation processes driven by lexical and coarticulatory contexts simultaneously affect listeners’ perception of a single segment and the individual differences in the compensation patterns. Sibilants on an /s-ʃ/ continuum were embedded into four lexical frames that differed in whether the lexical context favored /s/ or /ʃ/ perceptually and whether the vocalic context favored /s/ or not. Forty-two participants took a lexical decision task to decide whether each stimulus was a word or not. They also completed the autism-spectrum quotient questionnaire. The aggregate results of the lexical decision task show coexistence of lexically induced and coarticulatorily induced perceptual shifts in parallel. A negative correlation was found between the two kinds of perceptual shifts for individual listeners in lexical decisions, lending support to a potential trade-off between compensation magnitudes on different levels of cue integration.

This study is concerned with phonetic flexibility in adulthood. Through a longitudinal analysis of the speech of the public French speaker Michaëlle Jean, we explore the relationship between an individual’s phonetic characteristics and career path. We carried out an acoustic analysis of the contextual tense-lax split of the high vowels /i y u/, a phonetic feature of Quebec French that is not found in other French-speaking areas. Sixty-two recordings spanning three decades and divided into five different stages of the speaker’s career were considered. The results showed that Jean produced the tense-lax split as a journalist based in Quebec, but progressively suppressed it as her career became more international, after which a reversal of the trend was observed. Taken together, these results indicate that a certain phonetic flexibility is maintained over the lifespan, and that career is an influential external factor that could be more frequently considered in sociolinguistic studies. From a broader perspective, our study contributes to a better understanding of language use during social ageing, which has proven to be less linear than chronological ageing.

Stem alternations in Romance have recently been argued to be regulated largely by autonomously morphological (aka morphomic) organizational principles. Here, I assess the relative contribution of morphomic structures vis à vis alternative principles, namely semantic structure, and token frequency. Results confirm the exceptional importance of autonomously morphological domains on Romance verb stem alternations; however, inherent inflectional values and token frequency also play a decisive role in the overall stem-morphological similarity of different paradigm cells.

This article investigates the morphosyntactic behavior of the diminutive morpheme -aaj in three Arabic dialects (Egyptian Arabic, Syrian Arabic, and Jordanian Arabic). It argues that this morpheme is categorially a head that projects Size Phrase (cf. De Belder, Marijke. 2008. Size matters: Towards a syntactic decomposition of countability. In Natasha Abner & Jason Bishop (eds.), Proceedings of the 27th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics , 116–122. Somerville: Cascadilla Proceedings Project). In so doing, this analysis obviously challenges (Fassi Fehri, Abdelkader. 2018. Constructing feminine to mean: Gender, number, numeral, and quantifier extensions in Arabic . Lanham: Lexington Books) recent proposal that (non-)concatenative diminutives in Arabic are modifiers that are adjoined to categorized words when they indicate smallness in size. Additionally, this article provides an account of the observation that the diminutive morpheme -aaj can only appear with the feminine ending and a certain group of nouns, including collective aggregates (e.g., fruits and vegetables) and granular aggregates (e.g., grains, nuts, and seeds). We show that words suffixed with the diminutive morpheme -aaj can only give rise to an individuation reading (not a partition or non-count reading). This is syntactically interpreted as indicating that Size Phrase (headed by -aaj ) is always dominated in Arabic grammar by Division Phrase (cf. Borer, Hagit. 2005. In name only . Oxford: Oxford University Press), whose presence derives an individuation reading.

Based on a written Chinese–English code-switching corpus compiled from a Singaporean bilingual novel, this paper reports on the distribution of instances of inter-clausal code-switching in terms of their length, the distribution of the position of instances of inter-clausal code-switching in mixed sentences, and the pragmatic functions of inter-clausal code-switching of different lengths in different sentence positions. The study yields four results. First, the distribution in terms of length fits Zipf’s Law well, and bilingual speakers attempt to avoid lengthy inter-clausal code-switching in their communication. Second, the majority of inter-clausal code-switching appears in sentence boundary positions. Third, the major pragmatic functions of shorter or longer instances of inter-clausal code-switching are turn-opening, turn-closing, explicitness, and accuracy. Finally, instances of inter-clausal code-switching with medium clause lengths have two main functions, which are the conveying of irony and emphasis.

Adverbial connectives like therefore , which link a preceding ‘external’ to an ‘internal’ argument, can be regarded as anaphoric: The external argument is selected by an interpretation process akin to that of an event anaphor, and intervening material can appear between both arguments. We report on a crowdsourcing experiment on the German connectives trotzdem and dennoch that studies factors that lead readers to assume such long-distance arguments: semantic plausibility of intervening material, ‘subjective’ versus ‘objective’ content, and the presence of an anaphoric morpheme in the connective. We find that the type and content of the intervening material play an important role in argument choice.

Speakers’ choice between linguistic alternatives often depends on the situation, a prime example involving level of precision at which numerical information is communicated. We report on a production study in which participants report the time of an event in two different situations, and demonstrate that the results can be reproduced by a probabilistic game-theoretical model in which the speaker’s choice reflects a tradeoff between informativity, accuracy and hearer-oriented simplification. These findings shed light on the pragmatics of (im)precision, and the dynamics of situationally driven pragmatic variation more generally.

This paper is part of a series of experimental studies that try to empirically chart the landscape of non-canonical uses of the particle nur ‘only’ in German, aiming at a comprehensive picture of how those uses can affect the interpretation of utterances in different clausal environments. While previous studies have focused on modal particle uses of German ‘only’ in wh -questions and imperatives, the present paper focuses on a non-canonical use in adverbial contexts, which has not been studied experimentally before.

Construction Semantics (CxS) uses FrameNet frames to capture the semantic properties of grammatical constructions. It closes a gap between Frame Semantics and usage-based Construction Grammar as well as providing a uniform format to implement frames into constructicographic work. This article provides an overview of three core features of CxS. Starting point is (i) the modeling of semantic properties associated with constructions in terms of three types of frames. This makes possible (ii) the analysis of structural parallels between constructions and frames, in particular the semantic motivation of elements of a construct by frame elements. Lastly, (iii) an inventory of semantic parameters of constructions serves as a toolkit for generalizing over semantic properties of single constructs. A driving force behind CxS is the concept of frame proximity: a network of frames which allows one to distinguish lexically evoked frames that are related or unrelated to a frame associated with a construction.

This paper presents a precise definition of numeral classifiers, steps to identify a numeral classifier language, and a database of 3,338 languages, of which 723 languages have been identified as having a numeral classifier system. The database, named World Atlas of Classifier Languages (WACL), has been systematically constructed over the last 10 years via a manual survey of relevant literature and also an automatic scan of digitized grammars followed by manual checking. The open-access release of WACL is thus a significant contribution to linguistic research in providing (i) a precise definition and examples of how to identify numeral classifiers in language data and (ii) the largest dataset of numeral classifier languages in the world. As such it offers researchers a rich and stable data source for conducting typological, quantitative, and phylogenetic analyses on numeral classifiers. The database will also be expanded with additional features relating to numeral classifiers in the future in order to allow more fine-grained analyses.

Middle English had a rich inventory of verbs that could be used as causatives in periphrastic (or analytic) constructions. Interestingly, we see that two verbs like do and make , which share several similarities in their basic meaning, are both used as causative verbs. The present paper explores the relationship and the uses of causative do and causative make with an infinitive complement in the Middle English period. By means of a Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA), it will be investigated which semantic domains are more distinctively associated with each verb. The results of the statistical analysis will shed light on the semantic features that characterise these two verbs in Middle English. In addition, the quantitative analysis will help us understand why make began to be used as a causative verb and how productive these verbs were in Middle English.

The German additive particle auch associates with a constituent (the associated constituent, AC) which is related to contextually relevant discourse alternative(s). There are two versions of auch in German: a stressed and an unstressed version. Although in most of the cases, speakers have the choice of using the unstressed or stressed version, there are clear preferences for using one version over the other. It is the aim of the present paper to contribute to a clearer picture concerning factors constraining speakers’ preferences. By integrating another focus particle ( nur , ‘only’) in the context, we ask whether syntactic ( nur precedes its AC) and information structural properties (the AC being a focus) of a context sentence influence the choice of a speaker, or whether speakers apply default mappings (subjects as prototypical topics). The results of a sentence fragment arrangement task indicate that speakers strongly rely on default mechanisms, but that they are also influenced by syntactic and information structural properties of the context to some extent.

In an interesting paper, Casasanto, Daniel & Tom Gijssels. 2015. What makes a metaphor an embodied metaphor? Linguistics Vanguard 1(1). 327–337 introduce a skeptical view of recent studies into the embodied character of metaphorical source domains. According to the authors, there cannot be conclusive evidence on the matter thus far, since, for a metaphor to be embodied, specific simulations must be modality-specific and not simply restricted to modality-specific activity brain areas. In line with this, I argue that metaphors reflect a connection between perception, memory, and consciousness (embodied extended mind). The Embodied Extended Mind Theory (EEMT) introduced in this paper is indebted to Active Inference (AIF), a process theory for the comprehension of intelligent agency. EEMT defends the idea that language bears traces of nonlinguistic, bodily acquired information that reflects biological processes of energy exchange and conservation. Therefore, it is assumed that what makes a metaphor embodied is not only the relation between a source domain and a target domain in ad hoc regions in the brain, but the alignment of multiple independent systems during the (re)construction of events. Central to this is the idea that humans use stored perceptual maps, the combination of which permits us to manipulate concepts as part of complex event partitioning.

Are the cognitive units in the mental lexicon of Bantu speakers words or morphemes? The very small experimental literature addressing this question suggests that the answer is morphemes, but a closer look at the results shows that this answer is premature. A novel theory of the mental lexicon, the Discriminative Lexicon, which incorporates a word-based view of the mental lexicon, and is computationally implemented in the Linear Discriminative Learner (LDL) is put to the test with a data set of 11,180 Kinyarwanda nouns, and LDL is used to model their comprehension and production. LDL predicts comprehension and production of nouns with great accuracy. Our work provides support for the conclusion that the cognitive units in the mental lexicon of Kinyarwanda speakers are words.

Lexical dispersion and acquisition are evidently linked to each other. In one direction, the acquisition of a word is promoted by it being used frequently and in diverse contexts. Conversely, words that are acquired early might have higher chances of being produced frequently and diversely. In this study, we analyze various measures of lexical dispersion and assess the extent to which they are linked to age of acquisition by means of a Bayesian network model. We find that lexical prevalence, that is, the fraction of individuals knowing a word, is most closely linked to acquisition and argue that this can be partially explained by the population dynamics of lexical spread. We also highlight related cognitive mechanisms in language acquisition.

Psychological factors involved in learning a second language (L2) present a considerable interest for applied linguistics researchers and language educators. This study adopted the L2 Motivational Self System (L2MSS) framework to examine links between L2 motivation, willingness to communicate in the target language (L2WTC), classroom environment (L2CE) and psychological shyness of Chinese learners of English. The study posited that L2 motivation would be positively associated with L2WTC and that L2CE would mediate this relationship. It was further proposed that the L2MSS → L2CE → L2WTC nexus would be moderated by the language learners’ psychological shyness. Data were collected from 846 ( N  = 846) learners of English as a foreign language in three large state universities in China and analysed using rigorous statistical methods. The findings indicated that L2MSS was positively associated with L2WTC and that L2CE mediated the association between the two constructs. Furthermore, psychological shyness moderated the first and the second links in the L2MSS → L2CE → L2WTC nexus. These findings have notable pedagogical implications, such as the need to help students generate a positive self-image as an L2 user, to provide encouragement to the shy students and to create an inclusive and supportive classroom environment.

Multiword units have experienced renewed interest in recent research due to their prominent role in usage-based approaches to general linguistics, as well as in work on bilingualism and second language acquisition. While work in the last few decades focused on figurative multiword units (i.e., idioms), a growing number of studies have more recently focused on non-figurative units (collocations in particular, but also binomials or lexical bundles, for example). This work has highlighted not only the relevance of multiword units in language, but also the particular challenges that arise for non-native speakers acquiring conventional units in a second language. Despite important findings across linguistics, psycholinguistics and psychology, the sources of L2 difficulties have not been adequately and systematically investigated. The present paper brings together insights from different strands of the literature to review difficulties at three distinct loci, namely, input exposure, processing and retrieval.

From a young age, children go through a stage of leveling irregular forms. They are also known to probability-match variable phenomena. However, it is still unclear how children treat phenomena that are both irregular and variable. Does their tendency to overregularize take over, leading them to seize on the regular occurrences and produce them at an even higher rate than adults, or do children probability-match in these cases? In order to study this question, we turn to the variably voiced plurals of English nouns that end in a voiceless fricative, like leaves , houses , and paths . We find that children seem to probability-match for /s/-final and /θ/-final stems (e.g. houses, paths ), but not for /f/-final stems (e.g. leaves ). This finding has implications for our understanding of first language acquisition, and how learners acquire words with multiple processing requirements.

This article details the methodology behind the Manchester Voices Accent Van, and the accompanying online Virtual Van. In 2021, the project travelled around Greater Manchester in a van converted into a mobile recording booth, asking people to climb aboard and take part in an unsupervised interview about language and identity in the region. Participants could also take part from their own home through a bespoke website, called the Virtual Van, which asked the same interview questions as the physical Van and recorded speakers through their computer/phone microphone. With a view to informing others who might want to use similar methods in the future, we present a detailed description of the methodology here, as well as an overview and sample of the data collected. We conclude with a reflection on the elements of the data collection that went well, and a discussion of improvements and considerations for future research using this methodology.

Sociophonetic data analysis involves a pipeline of processing steps to convert a raw spreadsheet of acoustic measurements to interpretable results. While most studies report the steps used in their pipeline, very few explicitly report their order in which those steps were applied. This study analyzes a dataset containing vowel formant data from 53 speakers by processing it 5,040 unique ways, each representing a different permutation of seven processing steps. To analyze the effect that an order has on the overall results, pairs of pipelines that differed only by swapping two adjacent steps were compared. The most important steps in the pipeline were when normalization happened, how outliers were detected, and when good data was excluded. This study illustrates what happens when these steps are rearranged relative to each other in order to justify and recommend the following order of operations: classifying allophones, removing outliers, normalizing, and then subsetting.

The study examines the stylistic variation (interview vs. passage-reading) of socially meaningful variables among orally educated deaf speakers of Mandarin in Taipei, Taiwan. I examine the use of the retroflex and alveolar fricatives across two groups: deaf persons who received speech therapy or training, and those who did not receive speech medicalization. The two groups acquire the metalinguistic awareness of sibilant variation in different ways. Results show that the former group utilize the variables in the same way as hearing persons do – increasing the degree of retroflexion in reading-aloud speech. The latter group engage with the variable in an opposite way – decreasing the degree of retroflexion, which nevertheless also indexes able-bodiedness, possibly via the embodied link between a stronger hiss and a fronted sibilant. I argue that we need to carefully look at what different linguistic variants index through locating the variants in each speaker’s personal history.

According to usage-based linguistics, language variation addresses a functional need of the language user. That functional need may be dependent on the lexical realization of the varying constructions. For instance, while it may be useful to have an argument structure alternation express a particular semantic distinction for particular verbs or themes, that same distinction may be less relevant for other verbs or themes. As such, it has been argued that language variation should be investigated at low levels of schematicity, e.g. by studying argument structure alternations separately for various verbs, themes, etc. In this paper, we develop a data-driven procedure to do so, based on Memory-based Learning (MBL). The procedure focusses on generating hypotheses, is scalable, and can work with small datasets. It consists of three steps: (i) choosing features for the MBL classifier, (ii) running MBL analyses and selecting which analyses to put under further scrutiny, and (iii) inspecting which features were most useful in predicting the choice of variant in these analyses. Finally, the hypotheses that are inferred from these features are put to the test on separate data. As an example study, we investigate the Dutch naar -alternation.

The question of whether a letter is a grapheme or not is a perennial issue in writing research. The answer depends on which criteria are used to differentiate between letters and graphemes and, ultimately, how the unit ‘grapheme’ is defined. This problem is particularly relevant to complex graphemes, i.e. sequences of letters that behave like a single grapheme in certain respects. Typical for German is the ‹ch›. This paper argues for a scalar concept of graphemes, which compares the grapheme status of each of the units under investigation. For this purpose, new criteria for the identification of complex graphemes are used, which originate from handwriting analysis. There, it is shown that complex graphemes are connected with each other disproportionately often and also have deviating letter forms disproportionately often.

Menzerath-Altmann law (MAL) describes the relationship between the size of the construct and of its constituents, where the larger the whole, the smaller its parts . Despite numerous investigations dedicated to MAL, few studies have observed the relationship syntactically, especially at the clause level. The present study investigates three units in which clauses in English can be measured, i.e., argument, phrase, and word, by fitting MAL to the relationship between the size of the clause and its constituents. Results show that 1) clause length in phrases can be well fitted by probability distributions, while the goodness-of-fit is less favorable for clause length in arguments and words. 2) MAL holds reasonably well between the size of the clause in phrases and of the phrase in words under some conditions, i.e., within a specific range of construct size and text genres. 3) To summarize, the phrase, a notion proposed by Mačutek, Ján, Radek Čech & Jiří Milička. 2017. Menzerath-Altmann law in syntactic dependency structure. In Proceedings of the fourth international conference on dependency linguistics (Depling 2017) , 100–107 under the theoretical framework of dependency grammar, is the most appropriate one to be the neighboring unit of the clause among the three measurement units. These findings may shed light on the features of syntactic structures and lead to a better understanding of the human language system.

In Bangla, the verb k h aoa ‘to eat’ collocates with a wide variety of entities ranging from edible items to abstract concepts. That is, apart from the habitual process of eating and drinking, other events are expressed equally well with the verb k h aoa ‘to eat’ such that there is a growing tendency towards these verb usages. This calls for a detailed analysis of the prevailing sense distinctions in order to assess the extent of acceptability of these collocations. With this aim in mind, this paper utilizes concepts like polysemy, metaphor, and image-schema to arrive at a holistic understanding of the verb and, in turn, to identify the motivation behind higher productivity of k h aoa ‘to eat’ verb usages in Bangla.

This article aims to analyze the Korean internally headed relative clause (IHRC) construction from a Cognitive Grammar perspective. The primary issue concerning the Korean IHRC construction is the mismatch between the syntactic object and the semantic head. While the whole embedded clause headed by kes functions as a grammatical object, the semantic head may acquire the object status. I demonstrate that the mismatch is nothing but a metonymic process, just like the mismatch we observe in the loon in the water ; even when only the loon’s feet are in the water, the expression is felicitously understood without identifying the particular portion of the loon under water. Just like the speaker accesses the loon’s feet through the loon, she accesses the semantic head through the reified embedded clause in the IHRC construction. I show that adopting this general human cognitive process helps us reach a broader generalization and sheds new light on hitherto neglected examples.

One essential feature of voice alternation is that active and passive clauses centred around a given verb express the same meaning: the “meaning-preserving” hypothesis. One effect of the alternation is the different linking of grammatical relations and semantic roles, which affects the identity of the subject. This paper investigates the meaning-preserving hypothesis in voice alternation in Indonesian from a quantitative usage-based perspective by combining corpus-based data with sentence-production experiment data. It analysed Indonesian caused forward/backward motion verbs and the distribution of their (non-)metaphoric senses in active and passive. The findings demonstrate the frequency effects and sense-sensitivity of voice alternation, such that a given voice type of a verb is strongly associated with certain senses. This finding provides initial support for a previous study on voice alternation in an Austronesian language, predicting that the verb’s semantic properties may condition the statistical bias of the verb towards a particular voice. Some convergence between experimental and corpus findings indicates that participants demonstrate some representation of the strong association between a given voice form of the verb and the sense predominantly expressed in that form, highlighting the notion of item-specific representations of linguistic knowledge as found in construction grammar.

This study explores the monomodal and multimodal metaphors used in 80 cartoons by 11 Jordanian cartoonists to depict the coronavirus. The study adopts Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Multimodal Metaphor Theory as its theoretical framework. The results reveal that several source domains ( object, human, monster, weapon , and food ) were employed to depict different aspects of the coronavirus. They also show that the most used mode configuration pattern to construe the metaphors was monomodal mapping of the type pictorial source–pictorial target. The monomodality of the mappings was ascribed to the global omnipresence of the virus, which made the visual cues sufficient to construe this target domain. The results also demonstrate that Jordanian culture was referred to in some cartoons through intertextual links with previous discourse as a way to reflect the culture of the cartoonists, on the one hand, and to establish an affinity with the viewer, on the other. The study reveals the role of culture in creating monomodal and multimodal metaphors in editorial cartoons.