Volume 8, Issue 1

Two studies investigate the production and perception of speech chunks in Estonian. A corpus study examines to what degree the boundaries of syntactic constituents and frequent collocations influence the distribution of prosodic information in spontaneously spoken utterances. A perception experiment tests to what degree prosodic information, constituent structure, and collocation frequencies interact in the perception of speech chunks. Two groups of native Estonian speakers rated spontaneously spoken utterances for the presence of disjunctures, whilst listening to these utterances ( N = 47 N=47 ) or reading them ( N = 40 N=40 ). The results of the corpus study reveal a rather weak correspondence between the distribution of prosodic information and boundaries of the syntactic constituents and collocations. The results of the perception experiments demonstrate a strong influence of clause boundaries on the perception of prosodic discontinuities as prosodic breaks. Thus, the results indicate that there is no direct relationship between the semantico-syntactic characteristics of utterances and the distribution of prosodic information. The percept of a prosodic break relies on the rapid recognition of constituent structure, i.e. structural information.

This study explores the use of metaphors in the narratives of breast cancer patients in online magazine websites in the Arabic language. It aims to find similarities and/or differences between English and Arabic in respect of the metaphorical constructions of cancer experiences. The corpus of the study consists of 13,705 words in 19 narratives in Arabic. We used the metaphor identification procedure of Pragglejaz Group (2007) to detect the metaphors in the corpus. We focused on the role of metaphor in constructing our experience of cancer, and examined which metaphors are more frequent in the construction of the cancer experience. The results of the study revealed that there is a great similarity between Arabic and English in respect of the metaphors used to construct the cancer experience; the patients have framed their cancer situation via WAR and/or JOURNEY metaphors, with War metaphors more frequently used than Journey Metaphors. The findings also indicate that the Arabic narratives tended to include a stronger religious framework, constructing cancer as a kind of Trial by Ordeal in which one proves one’s firm faith through patience and acceptance of fate.

My Son’s Story and Disgrace are two novels written by two South African Noble laureates – Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee, respectively. The current study attempts to comparatively uncover the thematic foci as well as characterization aspects and interpersonal relations between characters in the two novels by dint of corpus linguistic tools, i.e., keywords and key clusters. Thus, using Sketch Engine online interface, the study presents a comparative thematic categorization of the two novels – a categorization which proves congruent with the thematization provided by previous critical literary studies of each novel. Both novels are found to revolve around racial tensions and illicit relationships in South Africa. However, although My Son’s Story is set during the apartheid and Disgrace is set after the apartheid is supposedly over, comparative corpus-driven investigation of the two novels reveals that the South Africa promised in My Son’s Story is betrayed in Disgrace , since racial violence and cross-race sexual dissipation persist. Quantitatively, using the notion of local textual functions, the associations between the use of key clusters, their repercussions on characters’ depiction, and their interpersonal relationships are uncovered. Clear affinities between the two protagonists, Sonny and David, are discerned, e.g., their love for music and literature, their sexual whims, their unsettled relationships with their children, etc. Empirically, the father–son/daughter turbulences, husband–wife vicissitudes, landlord–farmer intricacies, and love affairs’ intricacies are fathomed.

Referring to the so-called “actuation problem”, stability and change are two equally important problems in every theory of language change. However, apart from some exceptions, up to now studies predominantly focused on change, while stable linguistic features have been rarely considered. To address this desideratum and investigate factors that account for stability, the present article combines a real- and apparent-time analysis of the variable (en) in the Austrian base dialects by investigating data from 163 base dialect speakers from 40 locations across the country. The variable (en) occurs as a word-final ending in infinitive as well as in nominal forms, and – with respect to the preceding phonetic environment – shows a high degree of variation within and across all Austrian dialect areas. Although such a high degree of variation is considered a prerequisite for change, the analyses reveal a remarkable amount of stability for several variants of (en) in Austria. As will be argued, this fact can be attributed to both extra- and intralinguistic factors such as the variant’s areal distribution, its frequency, and morphological constraints.

Research into Ugandan English places it in the nativisation phase of the evolution of Englishes, amidst a nexus of local acceptance with ingredients of endonormativity and ingrained exonormative traditions. The current study shows how the use of modal verbs of obligation and spatial prepositions provides insights into how the nexus of the above phenomena has shaped Ugandan English. For example, although the preference of have to over must is a global trend, in Ugandan English, it is more prevalent in Bantu-speaking than in Nilotic-speaking areas because of substrate influence. Crucially, although the use of spatial prepositions is generally similar to how they are used in, for example, (standard) British English, the peculiar use of from to encode stative location in Ugandan English is, despite some regional variations, so widespread in the country that it tends towards endonormative stabilisation.

This article studies how Romance languages encode the individual-level (IL)/stage-level (SL) aspectual distinction in the domain of non-verbal predication. To this end, attributive copular clauses are considered, and those languages that mark the IL/SL paradigm by means of two different copulas ( ser and estar ‘to be’, such as Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese) are compared with mono-copular languages (such as French, Italian, and Romanian). On the basis of recent developments in the study of the IL/SL contrast and Spanish copulas, I propose that SL-ness is encoded in non-verbal SL-predicates as an uninterpretable instance of a [Stage] feature and that SL-copular sentences are derived by virtue of an agreement operation between the predicate and an Asp head that carries an interpretable instance of [Stage], which is realised as estar in languages such as Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan. The conclusion is that the inventory of aspectual elements is the same across Romance languages, which differ one from another with respect to the presence of an SL-copula (namely, estar ).

This study addresses the acquisition of referential expressions in pre-schoolers’ narratives in Estonian. A total of sixteen 6- to 7-year-old typically developing monolingual Estonian children were tested using the story “Baby Goat” from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) (Gagarina, Natalia, Klop, Daleen, Kunnari, Sari, Tantele, Koula, Välimaa, Taina, Balciuniene, Ingrida, Bohnacker, Ute and Walters, Joel. 2012. “MAIN: Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives.” ZAS Papers in Linguistics 56, 1–140, Gagarina, Natalia, Klop, Daleen, Kunnari, Saru, Tantele, Koula, Välimaa, Taina, Bohnacker, Ute and Walters, Joel. 2019. “MAIN: Multilingual assessment instrument for narratives – Revised.” ZAS Papers in Linguistics 63). The objective was to understand how children introduce a new referent and how they maintain referents in their storytelling, and what correlation could be observed between the length of the story and the average length of the reference chain. Qualitative analyses revealed that children generally introduced new referents using bare nouns; they also generally used bare nouns for further reference. NPs consisting of a noun and a determiner were more frequently used for main characters in the story, while bare nouns were preferred for other characters. The influence of the typological character of Estonian can be observed in the use of zero references and pragmatically driven word order in children’s utterances. In general, the length but not the complexity of the story was correlated with the average number of reference units in a chain.

Beginning in July 2020, Egyptian social media were flooded with stories about a young man raping and sexually harassing about 100 women and under-age girls. An Instagram account called @assaultpolice posted narratives of the man’s victims reporting the verbal and physical abuse they were subject to. The whole set of issues about the sexual activities of this man, who was dubbed the “Sexual Predator,” trended on Twitter and Instagram and was then picked up by many Egyptian talk shows. The issue received much attention because of the conservative nature of Egyptian society in which the tendency to blame victims of sexual abuse leads to their remaining silent about any abuse they have suffered. The power of social media in highlighting these narratives, and ensuing similar ones, has helped the whole community to realize the severity of the problem of sexual harassment. This resulted in a push for an amendment to Egyptian law in 2021 placing harsher penalties on crimes relating to sexual harassment and concealing the identity of victims. This article uses a corpus-assisted approach to analyse the discursive strategies used in these narratives to explore the discursive construction of the sexual aggressor and the victims. The analysis shows that the narratives are told from the perspective of the victims, with access always given to the victims’ inner feelings and perception, and that the male abuser is constructed as the active agent while the female victims as acted upon.

The past few decades have witnessed an upsurge of scholarly interest in the generic descriptions of PhD theses following Swales’ seminal Genre Analysis . Fitted within the Create A Research Space (CARS) model, the thesis introduction plays a key role in justifying research originality/significance, where novice writers engage with academic communities through “establishing a research territory” (Move 1), “establishing a niche” (Move 2), and “occupying the niche” (Move 3). As the hinge of the CARS model, Move 2 (hereinafter EN) is of strategic importance as it enables writers to “sell” their ideas by pointing to the gap/niche in the “marketplace” of previous research, which is typically realized through the co-occurrences of negation alongside other interpersonal language resources. Negation , as a disclaim marker within Martin and White’s appraisal framework, is a prominent linguistic indicator of EN. Nevertheless, little research has systematically examined the use of negation in ENs of PhD thesis introductions. Accordingly, the study investigated negation via the appraisal framework addressing subtypes of negation ( disalignment , cautious detachment , unfulfilled expectation ) within ENs in the introduction sections of 120 PhD theses. The results showed that disalignment is the most frequent subtype of negation , while “not” and “no” are commonly used as indicators of negation . Our findings also revealed intriguing co-occurrences of negation sub-categories alongside other relevant appraisal resources. The corpus-informed results are expected to shed light on the nature and practice of PhD theses that educators may take into account during thesis writing instruction.

One of the previously widespread sociolinguistic theories about gender differences was related to differences in the expression of emotion. Women’s language was stereotypically associated with emotional expressivity, whereas male language was connected to a lack of affect and toughness evincing (cf. Eckert, Penelope, and Sally McConnell-Ginet 1992). With regard to gender differences in the expression of emotion, in this article, I provide a brief overview of the existing research findings pertaining to males’ expressions of emotion, followed by an examination of embarrassment-related expressions of emotions and the role of paralinguistic cues in this respect. To accomplish this, I adopt a contrastive focus based on analysis of male talk in Ukraine and Austria that will enable the identification of the likely differences and similarities in expressing emotional vulnerability.

It is generally accepted that of the five tone classes reconstructed for disyllabic nouns in Middle Japanese (MJ), Classes 2.4 and 2.5 exhibit a split correspondence with proto-Ryukyuan (pR) tone Classes B and C. This split correspondence is of tremendous importance for the reconstruction of the proto-Japonic (pJ) tone system, because, in the absence of a conditioning factor accounting for the split, it has led to the reconstruction of additional tone classes at the pJ level. However, of the approximately 100 nouns belonging to these classes, the tone class of only half of them has been reconstructed for pR. Before embarking on the reconstruction of the pJ tone system, we must therefore first reconstruct the pR tone class of the nouns belonging to MJ Classes 2.4 and 2.5. This study provides a reconstruction of the tone classes in pR for 75 cognates using the latest comparative data of Northern and Southern Ryukyuan dialects. The results confirmed the existence of a split correspondence, where Class 2.4 and 2.5 nouns are found to be roughly split in half between pR Classes B and C, demonstrating that it is not a merely sporadic irregularity.

Expressing opinions is considered a significant communicative act frequently taking place in our conversations. It is one of the fairly neglected areas of research in the Arabic context. Among the studies conducted on the communicative acts, to the best of our knowledge, there has been no attempt to investigate the expressions of opinion and its strategies specifically in Jordanian Arabic (JA). To this end, the current study intends to investigate the communicative act of opinion giving in JA with reference to gender disparities. Data elicited from 50 male and 50 female speakers of JA via Discourse Completion Task and role-plays revealed that Jordanians resort to a mixture of expressions to convey their opinion clearly. They use various types of strategies, including direct expression of opinion, indirect manifestation of opinion, advice, suggesting, enumeration, prayers, address terms, complaining, personalized hedges, and rarely opting out. In addition, gender differences were also noticed in expressing this speech act. Males use direct expression strategy and imperative expression significantly more than the female participants, whereas the females used six strategies significantly more than their male counterparts: indirect expression, advice, personalized hedges, suggesting, prayers, and address terms.

The present study aims to contribute to the field of Foreign Language (FL) acquisition by analysing English as a Foreign Language (EFL) vocabulary learning in pre-primary education learners following a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) programme. Although the present study focuses on productive vocabulary acquisition, such results are later compared to receptive vocabulary findings reported in a previous study following the same learners over the same period of time. Additionally, word frequency effects are studied. A 6-month longitudinal study was conducted with Catalan and Spanish bilingual EFL learners ( N = 155) aged 4 and 5. Through the programme, two curricular units traditionally taught in the learners’ mother tongue were worked on through a soft CLIL approach. Learners were administered a general vocabulary pre-test, and by the end of the intervention, receptive and productive vocabulary tests were given to the students, including the target words presented in the soft CLIL sessions. Positive trends were found in productive vocabulary learning, which may eventually turn into significant differences over a longer treatment period. A significant frequency effect was observed, as there was a higher recollection rate of higher-frequency words. When comparing receptive and productive vocabulary results, statistically significant higher scores were reported in receptive tests than in productive ones.

Machine translation (MT) has made significant strides and has reached accuracy levels that often make the post-editing (PE) of MT output a viable alternative to manual translation. However, despite professional translators increasingly considering PE as a valid stage in their translation workflow, little has been done to investigate MT output for the purpose of informing training in PE. Against this background, the present project focuses on the handling of tense and aspect configurations in the English translation of Arabic sentences using current neural machine translation (NMT) systems. Using a dataset of representative Arabic sentences, the output of five NMT engines was assessed against reference translations. The investigation reveals regressing accuracy levels when comparing morphological, structural, and contextual tenses. These findings are believed to represent valuable information that contributes to a more informed training in the PE of Arabic-into-English NMT output.

The present article is dedicated to the syntax, morphology, and phonetics of ideophones in Arusa Maasai. After examining the compliance of 69 ideophonic lexemes with the typologically driven prototype of an ideophone, the authors conclude that Arusa ideophones may range from canonical to non-canonical even within a single language module. When syntax, morphology, and phonetics are considered jointly, holophrastic and asyntagmatic ideophones are more canonical than ideophones used as verbal modifiers and parts of complex predicates, which are, in turn, more canonical than predicative ideophones. The extent of canonicity is inversely correlated with the systematicity and integration of ideophones in sentence grammar and their diffusion into other lexical classes: predicative ideophones have been fully incorporated into the category of verbs; for ideophones employed as verbal modifiers, a comparable incorporation into the category of adverbs has not been completed; for all the other types, especially holophrastic and asyntagmatic, ideophones still maintain their categorical individuality. Overall, ideophones constitute an “old” category in Arusa, one that is well advanced on its grammaticalization cline.

The study focuses on the interaction between length of exposure and instruction in the L2 English acquisition process of L1 Spanish school children. Two target structures involving noun premodification are targeted: noun–noun (NN) compounds and adjective–noun (AN) strings. Four groups of participants have been studied for 3 years: a group that has been exposed to a specifically designed teaching program targeting NN compounds and a group that has received the regular English instruction program which does not address this structure as part of the curriculum. Two age subgroups appear in each case. The longitudinal judgment data elicited show that performance improves in the cooperation between length of exposure and the exposure to the NN instruction program. Furthermore, it is this last issue that actually takes the lead in that the NN instruction program directly impacts on not only NN compounds but also AN strings. This points to instruction being determinant in the L2 learning process; that is, a consciously and carefully directed instruction is proven to be more effective than length of exposure itself. This study on longitudinal experimental data contributes to shed light on the factors involved in instructed L2 acquisition.

Shakespeare’s Shylock has been so debatable a character since its introduction to the English stage. According to the existing literature, there is an on-going debate as to whether this Jewish character is a villain or falls victim to the anti-Semitic community. The current study applies deictic theory of pronouns to examine the relationship between this character’s employment of thou and you , and his affect based on the hypothesis that a person’s use of pronouns, among other function words, can reveal their sense of self. Findings have shown that Shylock uses both pronouns in the normative way considerably more than in the pragmatic way; that he adheres to the normative use of the terms more than do his Christian counterparts; and that when he pragmatically uses them, expressions of his negative emotions often appear. Findings also suggest that (fictional) persons’ use of second-person pronouns reflects to some degree their sense of freedom and reciprocity relative to others. In this case, the rather restrictive and abusive employment of thou and you by the Jew indicates him being suppressed and alienated from society, which in turn drives him to wreak vengeance on the Christians – the culminating action that makes him meet his eventual downfall.

The global reach of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing localized policy reactions provides a case to uncover how a global crisis translates into linguistic discourse. Based on the JSI Timestamped Web Corpora that are automatically POS-tagged and accessible via SketchEngine, this study compares French, German, Dutch, and English. After identifying the main names used to denote the virus and its disease, we extracted a total of 1,697 associated terms (according to logDice values) retrieved from news media data from January through October 2020. These associated words were then organized into categories describing the properties of the virus and the disease, their spatio-temporal features and their cause–effect dependencies. Analyzing the output cross-linguistically and across the first 10 months of the pandemic, a fairly stable semantic discourse space is found within and across each of the four languages, with an overall clear preference for visual and biomedical features as associated terms, though significant diatopic and diachronic shifts in the discourse space are also attested.

This is an introduction to the Special Issue: Translation Times, edited by Titela Vîlceanu and Daniel Dejica.

Drawing on the scholarly acknowledgement regarding the experimental nature of dialogue in Modern and Postmodern literature, this article attempts at investigating the translatability of dialogic utterances displaying deviant language. The relevance of the study is given by the structural differences between languages, which oftentimes triggers the impossibility of rendering the dialogic information relative to the literary characters’ identity in the target language. The examples are depicted from several fictional texts, where part of the characters’ identity is constructed by the peculiarities of their speech which deviates, in a range of manners, from standard English. Such deviant language indicates the characters’ idiolectal, sociolectal or dialectal identity, as well as the broader social context in which they act. The examination of deviant language leads to findings concerning its structural variety and its essential role in completing some literary characters’ identity and, implicitly, its importance in translation. Solutions are suggested to the interlingual transfer of formally untranslatable deviant language of a grammatical, phonological and lexical nature, taking also account of criteria pertaining to functional aspects. The conclusions discuss structural, phonological and lexical possibilities of the target language, the translator’s creative engagement in the translation of deviant identity-marking language and suggest further research opportunities.

The Polysystem Hypothesis , bringing together language, literature, culture and society, has hallmarked Translation Studies, while heralding the cultural turn, subsequently attributed to the study of Bassnett and Lefevere. Without a shadow of doubt, this conceptual and methodological framework continues to spark interdisciplinary research interests, allowing for recasts. In this context, the current article sets out to investigate the translation of Australian writers in Romania, from a diachronic and synchronic perspective alike. The main aims are related to featuring quantitative aspects – number of translated authors, number of translated works, etc., and qualitative dimensions – translation policies, the role of translators in the interlinguistic and intercultural transfer of texts, other controlling factors. Furthermore, the affordability, portability and ownership of literary translation underlie shifting patterns of translation knowledge creation and transfer and of translation effective practice.

The present article focuses on strategies of translating fiction quotatives from English into Romanian. Starting from the definition of quotatives as structures that in their simplest form consist of a subject and a quoting verb and accompany a quotation, I have selected two samples of literary text and their respective multiple versions so as to investigate patterns in which these structures are translated. Because, as pointed out in the literature, fiction quotatives describe narrative-advancing events and contribute to the development of characters, the investigation of how fiction quotatives are translated (in particular how say , the most frequently used verb in quotatives, is treated in translation) might prove to offer valuable insight for literary translation studies, correlating tendencies that seem to be cross-linguistic. For instance, it has been demonstrated that in Spanish there is a tendency of replacing the generic quoting verb say with other manner of speaking verbs. This may be seen as a form of “enrichment” as a translation strategy. The article advances the hypothesis that a similar phenomenon can be attributed to Romanian and links this phenomenon to parametric variation in English and Romance.

In very broad terms, translatability means that the translator is able to establish a relation of equivalence between a certain source text and its target variant. The notion of equivalence has a very complicated status in translation studies, because, on the one hand, this discipline does not provide a generally accepted definition of the concept, and, on the other, because it has a very complex nature, involving a variety of levels. The present article is based on the assumption that, even if there are situations when the source-language lexico-semantic items, grammatical structures or whole texts are so problematic that they seem almost impossible to be transferred into another language. The term “untranslatability” is not appropriately used with reference to such situations, because a certain type of equivalence can be always achieved. The article will approach the notions of equivalence and (un)translatability in both theoretical and practical terms, offering relevant examples specific to the transfer between Romanian and English.

The popularity of various types of abbreviations makes it necessary to rediscuss their categorization and possible disambiguation. We rely on categorization types applied in cognitive linguistics, also confronting definitions and forms stemming from both linguistic and software-based approaches. A major distinction is observed between abbreviations resulting from one-word and multi-word sequences, leading to various subtypes with prototypical, less central, and hybrid cases. Although guidelines offer advice on their use, these rules should be re-evaluated in specific settings, such as subtitling and translation. While previous research on the topic focused on journal articles, we have collected a database of nearly 13,000 abbreviations and acronyms from five American TV series with the help of a specially designed algorithm. Our research also highlights the importance of punctuation, exemplifying some of the most frequent ones with alternative versions (with or without period) and discusses the Romanian and Hungarian translations of a well-known American agency. The concluding remarks mention that even if subtitle conventions are not severely regulated, a database of acronyms may significantly improve quality, especially in the case of TV series.

Adverbs are a very heterogeneous class that raise a lot of problems not only for their syntactic and semantic interpretation but also for their translation. The current analysis draws on previous formal work on manner adverbs as a very heterogeneous class that exhibits different interpretations with respect to their context of occurrence and their position in the clause. Our current discussion of manner adverbs aims at investigating the different strategies employed by the Romanian translator in rendering the variety of manner adverbs occurring in the translation of P.G. Wodehouse’s “ Right ho, Jeeves .” Because English is an adverbial language while Romanian appears to be partly adverbial, it will be interesting to see how the Romanian translator fares in the endeavour of translating manner adverbs and if the predictions made in formal studies on manner adverbs are borne out by the data provided by translation.

Digital Humanities favours creativity with the help of remixing, hybridization, contamination, and computational translation. An example in point is the book published in 2021 by MARGENTO, Steve Rushton and Taner Murat: Various wanted/Se caută diversuri. Starting from Ovid’s poetic cycle Amores , the authors prove their adroitness in playing with rhythms, prosody, and augmented or compensated translations. Their enterprise is founded on the archetype of dislocation, as the three poets who helped them establish a model for writing/assembling poems, Ovid, Christopher Marlowe, and John Dryden, were ostracized figures. That is why the translations embarked upon in the volume are dislocating and creative. These approaches are tackled with the help of Eugen Coșeriu’s integral linguistics and with Sorin Ciutacu’s enlightening observations on the study of change. The latest enhancements in Digital Humanities have consecrated a second orality and a third textuality, as José Manuel Lucía Megías remarked.

Ophelia, Shakespeare’s most tragic heroine, seems to be the character who has generated much more enthusiasm on the part of visual artists than on the part of literary critics. Consequently, there are a high number of artefacts, produced starting with the nineteenth century, which have been inspired by Hamlet’s unfortunate bride. Of this assortment of artefacts, we have picked some to deal with here. In analysing them, we survey through the history of the heroine’s representation in various visual media, comment on them from the point of view of intersemiotic translation, and verify, in broad lines, the hypothesis that they may be tributary to a number of factors ranging from some connected to the artist’s own identity and subjective interpretation of the original to factors connected to more general stereotypes, beliefs, attitudes, and socio-cultural trends.

Idioms have long been an intricate part of language both from a semantic and a translational point of view. According to Cognitive Linguistics, many idioms do not always have an arbitrary meaning, as postulated by their traditional definition. The purpose of this article is to bring into focus the contribution that the Cognitive Linguistic approach can make to the process of selecting appropriate target language counterparts of source language idioms while applying translation strategies. To this end, we attempt at identifying appropriate Romanian counterparts of several English heart idioms on the basis of the same cognitive mechanisms (conventional knowledge, conceptual metaphors and metonymies) which motivate, to a certain extent, their meanings. Moreover, considering its specificity, this study is structured by drawing on the first three strategies suggested by “Baker, Mona. 1992. In other words. A coursebook on translation . London & New York: Routledge,” which translators can make use of when being faced with the challenging task of rendering idioms from the source text into the target text. In addition, our analysis is exclusively concerned with systemic equivalent idioms in terms of language as a system (Kvetko, Pavol. 2009. An outline of English phraseology . 3rd revised edition. Trnava: Univerzita Sv. Cyrila a Metoda).

Providing access to knowledge and information for all citizens, including the disadvantaged ones, is a constant preoccupation of the decision-making bodies of countries across the globe, particularly of developed and developing ones. In Europe, guidelines for creating accessible informational content have been created, being constantly improved and adapted to the new social realities. As a member state of the European Union, Romania also fosters social inclusion at various levels, including that of making information accessible to all people. Nevertheless, a lot still needs to be done in the field of linguistic accessibility as the analysis presented in the article shows. For example, research should be conducted to draft guidelines for using accessible languages . Then, the study of accessible languages should be implemented in “Translation and interpreting” study programmes for the purpose of developing skills that could be employed socially to increase knowledge accessibility, through interlingual and intralingual translation and interpreting services. In this way, awareness is raised in society and professionals specialised in linguistic accessibility are provided to the labour market to contribute, as language professionals, to the creation of an inclusive society.

This is an introduction to the Special Issue on Modification in Functional Discourse Grammar.

Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) assumes a strict separation between representational and interpersonal meaning, which are captured in independent levels within the grammar, and utterance meaning, which arises in contexts of language use. This article argues that this division of labour is problematic for the treatment of modifiers in the noun phrase (non-subsective adjectives in particular), which induce semantic changes in the designation of the noun they modify. It is further claimed that the view of semantics in the model should pivot around a weak interpretation of the notion of compositionality, which allows the modulation of linguistic meaning in context in the dynamic construction of term structures. This is shown to be compatible with the basic tenets of functional linguistics that FDG endorses and very much in line with the contextualist tradition that treats linguistic expressions as propositionally underspecified units which can be truth-conditionally enriched in actual use. The article shows that only minor modifications are necessary in the model, which basically amount to increasing the functional role of the Contextualizer.

It is generally accepted that the order of elements within the English noun phrase is relatively fixed, and that, in the prefield, determiners (primary and secondary) precede modifiers. This article is concerned with a group of noun phrases exhibiting non-canonical word order, namely those cases in which a modifier precedes a numeral, such as a fabulous two years , a staggering 30 singles , that short fourteen months, and the largest two markets . Using corpus data from the British National Corpus , it is shown that such noun phrases are far more heterogeneous (in terms of the kind of noun, the scope and type of the modifier, the form and number of the determiner, and subject-verb agreement) than assumed in previous studies. It is argued that the variation observed in the data can only be accounted for if different subtypes of such NPs are distinguished, each characterized by its own combination of functional and formal properties. Finally, it is demonstrated how Functional Discourse Grammar, with its function-to-form approach and its different levels and layers of representation, is particularly well-suited to capture the main features of the construction as a whole, as well as the more specific semantic and syntactic properties of each of the subtypes.

This article addresses the question of how the distribution and role of English evidential - ly adverbs in the noun phrase can be accounted for using the framework of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG). Both adverbs and adjectives occurring in noun phrases are categorized in various ways. The results of the categorization offer insights into the distribution of these adverbs and adjectives. Four generalizations are arrived at concerning the combination of evidential adverbs and adjectives in noun phrases. First, the lower in the FDG hierarchy the category of an adverb, the less frequent the occurrence of that category in the noun phrase. Thus, higher reportative adverbs are very frequent, and lower adverbs of event perception are very infrequent. Second, evidential adverbs do not modify adjectives that express the speaker’s subjective evaluation of the referent. Third, the higher-level reportative and inferential adverbs modify adjectives expressing permanent properties, whereas the lower adverbs of deduction and event perception do not. Finally, neither restrictiveness nor the evaluative vs descriptive nature of the adjective appears to solely determine the category of evidential modification of the adjective. We furthermore discuss the pragmatic effects of the evidential adverb in the noun phrase, such as distancing, and the stress shift that may accompany it.

Illocutionary adverbs such as frankly , honestly , and seriously have been commonly analysed as interpersonal (non-truth-conditional) modifiers that are characterised by syntactic and prosodic detachment from the ‘host’ they are associated with. However, recent accounts ( e.g. Keizer 2018a) have shown that the formal (syntactic and prosodic) properties of such adverbs do not necessarily follow directly from the semantic non-truth-conditionality towards the main proposition. With respect to the prosodic realisation, such interpersonal adverbs can either be integrated into the respective utterance or detached from it ( i.e. form a separate Intonational Phrase [IP]). The prosodic realisation is determined by the specific discourse-pragmatic features of such interpersonal adverbs, namely whether they are intended as separate (Subsidiary) Discourse Acts or whether they are part of a single Discourse Act at the Interpersonal Level (Keizer 2018a, 2018b, 2019, 2020). The aim of this article is to investigate these predictions by looking into the prosodic features of illocutionary adverb on the one hand and their discourse-pragmatic features on the other. It will be argued, based on the prosodic analysis of a set of spoken corpus data, that (i) the formation of separate IP is indeed triggered by the formation of Subsidiary Discourse Act, (ii) the formal properties (position and intonational pattern) are determined by the specific rhetorical function assigned to the respective Discourse Act, and (iii) the prosodic integration correlates with the adverbs being integral part of a single Discourse Act at the Interpersonal Level.

This article seeks to explore the function and linguistic status of non-central members of the class of “degree words,” focusing on specific cases in English and Spanish, namely, the English adverbs way and proper , the Spanish trendy phrase “Adj no, lo siguiente ” and the adverb muy. These intensifiers will be explored in the light of the architecture of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG), specifically in relation to the levels of linguistic representation that are distinguished in this theory, mainly the Interpersonal (or pragmatic) Level (IL) and the Representational (or semantic) Level (RL) and in terms of FDG’s distinction between lexical and grammatical units. It will be shown that the various functional properties of these expressions can be easily accommodated in this theory. As intensifying devices, these expressions are represented as units specifying the Lexical Property at the RL. In addition, some of these expressions can be used with an emphatic function, pertaining to the set of pragmatic distinctions that are represented at the IL.

This article proposes a fine-grained semantic analysis of similative and comparative constructions within the framework of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG). The core idea is that, when used in their prototypical modifying functions, the two types of constructions are built upon two semantic frames that share an identical structure but differ as regards the semantic category that underlies the whole modifying expression – whence the title of the article: similatives are Manners and comparatives are Quantities. At the same time, I argue that similatives can also be put to modifying and predicative uses in which they do not express a Manner but a Configurational Property (i.e., a “nuclear predication”) and that comparatives do not express a Quantity when occurring as arguments of lexical(ized) ditransitive predicates like prefer or would rather , nor when the two terms of the comparison are introduced by a specific type of temporal expression. Finally, the paper refines previous FDG approaches to the alternation between analytic and synthetic expression of comparison in such languages as English and Latin, proposing that the English comparative suffix -er is liable to being modified by narrow-scope measure expressions and is therefore a partly lexical element and not a fully grammaticalized marker of comparison.

The so-called insubordinate clauses have received an increasing amount of attention in recent years in a wide variety of typologically different languages and from different analytical perspectives. This article concerns itself with one particular type of insubordination, namely insubordinate if -clauses ( e.g. If you’ll just come next door , if you hadn’t noticed , if I may ask ). So far, the extensive literature on these clauses has concentrated mainly on their discourse-pragmatic functions, their degree of autonomy, and their degree of conventionalization. Relatively little work has been done on the formal (syntactic and prosodic) features of these clauses, nor on the relationship between these formal features and the functions they perform. The aim of this article is to investigate insubordinate if -clauses from the perspective of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) in order to establish a taxonomy reflecting (and linking) their functional and formal properties. It is argued that FDG is ideally suited for this task as (i) it takes a function-to-form approach; (ii) it does not take the clause or sentence as its basic unit of analysis, but rather the (independent or subsidiary) Discourse Act; and (iii) it recognizes a range of interpersonal and representational modifiers. The basis for the classification proposed is corpus data from a range of corpora of spoken and written English and Dutch.

This study traces the relationship between two erstwhile separate linguistic elements, just and so , within the framework of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG). In keeping with FDG’s form-oriented function-to-form approach, the study proceeds semasiologically by, first, examining the uses of relatively independent forms ( i.e. the focus particle just modifying so as a degree word and a manner proform), then turning to more tightly-knit structures ( i.e. just so as a subordinator of purpose and condition), and finally, looking at the fixed expression just so used as a part of a pragmatic marker. Using data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the Corpus of Historical American English , we argue that the different meanings of just so raise a number of issues related to the analysis of modification in FDG, namely the status and function of the modifier just in the constructions under discussion and the concomitant representation of so . Furthermore, the analysis shows that FDG can model very precisely the interplay of semantic and pragmatic information in the stages when just so is still compositional, with just providing interpersonal ( i.e. pragmatic) and so representational ( i.e. semantic) information, as well as its development into the non-compositional and purely pragmatic discourse marker just so you know .

This article discusses the diachronic development and the different uses of the reportative word dizque (diachronically based on diz que ‘she/he/it says that’) using data from Colombian and Mexican Spanish. The study presents a predominantly qualitative analysis of diachronic, twentieth- and twenty-first-century written data. The theoretical framework applied in this article is Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG), which is particularly useful in this context as it distinguishes between the interpersonal and representational functions of language. The main points made are: (i) dizque is an adverb that arose from a process of lexicalization rather than grammaticalization; (ii) in most of its uses, dizque has an interpersonal function in the sense that the Speaker instructs the Addressee that she/he is not the source of the information provided; (iii) by means of diachronic, dialectal, and typological data, it is shown that the scope of dizque is gradually decreasing; (iv) the only scope decrease that leads to a functional change of dizque is its application outside the context of speech-reports. FDG serves to account for each step in the scope decrease of dizque by means of its hierarchical approach to the actional and descriptive functions of verbal interaction.