Volume 45, Issue 4 -

English Affixal Nominalizations Across Language Registers This paper is a study of register variation as observed in the distribution and productivity of English nominalizing suffixes. Little if anything is known from previous research about whether or not morphological structure beyond the nature of the rightmost affix is a conditioning factor in register variation. As a consequence, nominalizations ending in a particular affix, or virtually all nominalizations tend to be somewhat superficially treated as collectively more characteristic of one register than another. This study fills this research gap by showing that the suffixes exhibit preferences as to their occurrence in particular registers and that, in the case of the most common suffixes ( -ness, -ity, -ion ), the internal morphological make-up of their base forms may also significantly bear on their quantitative distributions. As regards morphological productivity, the suffixes will uncontroversially exhibit varied degrees of productivity. More interestingly, however, our analysis shows that the morphological constitution of the base form may still influence the probability of a new word coming into existence, and this probability will further be conditioned by register preferences.

Processing Clitic Pronouns in Bulgarian — Evidence from Normal and Agrammatic Comprehension Clitic clusters display a complicated interaction of prosodic and syntactic properties which determines their word order and stress patterns. In Bulgarian, short pronouns appear as unstressed verbal enclitics in positive utterances. Proclitic negation attracts the pronouns and forms with them a prosodic unit stressed on the second syllable, the pronoun. Theoretical linguistics characterizes the behaviour of object clitics in terms of "non-trivial chains" (Bošković 2001) containing copies. The overt realisation of a higher or lower copy depends on phonological constraints like enclitisation requirements. In line with the slow-syntax-hypothesis (Burkhardt et al. 2008) and with the assumption that prosody-related processes may also compete for the same limited processing resources of Broca's aphasics (Avrutin et al. 1999), we test sensitivity to the phonosyntactic constraints negation imposes on the word order of personal and reflexive clitics. Results suggest that the pattern of agrammatic processing of clitic clusters resembles normal comprehension but proceeds in a protracted manner. Employing a self-paced reading task and an experimental design which reduces discourse-related interpretation processes, we also show that the syntactic functions of personal object clitics as syntactic object agreement markers in Bulgarian are relatively preserved in the aphasic group.

Chinese Syntactic and Typological Properties Based on Dependency Syntactic Treebanks This paper offers a quantitative analysis of the syntactic and typological properties of Chinese based on five Chinese dependency treebanks. The study shows that mean dependency distance of Chinese is 2.84; 40-50% dependencies are between non-adjacent words; Chinese is a mixed language with a governor-final and SV-VO-AdjN preference; the mean dependency distance of governor-initial dependencies is greater than that of governor-final ones. Methodologically, the paper adopts five treebanks with different text genres and annotation schemes as a resource to study syntactic features of a language. This method avoids corpus influences on results so that the conclusions can be more reliable and robust. If suitable treebanks are available, it will be an easy task to apply our method to other languages. In this way, the method has a broad theoretical and cross-linguistic perspective.

Plus Ça Change … Serbian EFL Students' Attitudes Towards Varieties of English This paper presents the findings of a sociolinguistic study investigating the attitudes of adult Serbian EFL students (N=114), trained as future EFL teachers, to 8 regional and 2 EFL varieties of English, relative to accent identification. A modified verbal-guise technique, based on semantic differential scales for 15 traits in the dimensions of social prestige, social closeness, and personal integrity, was combined with a direct-method questionnaire. The findings show that the participants were not familiar enough with different regional accents, but, rather, that they relied on broad constructs such as "British" or "American" English. They expressed conservative attitudes, rating most favourably the varieties they associated with the notions of "standard" and "correct", and least favourably those associated with common negative stereotypes or "foreign" accents. In the light of the participants' meagre results in accent recognition, we argue that further language attitude research is needed in the EFL context, where attitudes to varieties gain even more weight with the shift towards education for intercultural communication.

Metadiscourse Functions in English and Persian Sociology Articles: A Study in Contrastive Rhetoric This study on contrastive rhetoric reports on metadiscourse functions in sociology articles in Persian and English. The results have revealed a higher number of metadiscourse elements in the English texts. Among the different metadiscourse elements used, text connectors are the most frequently employed in both languages. Modality markers are the second most frequent in both languages although the English writers used nearly twice the number of these markers. Overall, it is found that the frequency of textual metadiscourse markers is greater than the interpersonal markers in both language samples. It was further revealed that the Persian writers of sociology texts are less interested in explicitly orienting the readers and some of the main points in an article, especially in the concluding section, are left for the readers to infer. This, we believe, is the result of less reliance on academic writing in the educational system of the country. Instead, the Iranians are largely encouraged to employ a flowery language and rhetoric to decorate their writing in their school years which makes them less attentive of their readers.

English-Turkish Cognates and False Cognates: Compiling a Corpus and Testing How They are Translated by Computer Programs Cognate status is one of the most complicated issues for those who deal with or are interested in linguistics. In the present study, we have provided a general overview related to this specific matter, and compiled a list of English—Turkish cognates and false cognates. According to the derived list, we determined that 2411 of English words, examined from among approximately 80,000 words, are either cognates or false cognates in Turkish. After determining the number of cognate and false cognate words, we tested and evaluated the correctness of the translations of three software programs and five websites that provide translation services using some of the cognates and false cognates from the derived list. Results suggest that cognate words are translated correctly in most sentences at lexical level, while false cognates and especially partial false cognates are mostly translated wrongly. Nevertheless, at sentential level, it is revealed that almost all sentences translated by computer are unsatisfactory, and need human correction.

On Hearing Colours — Cross-Modal Associations in Vowel Perception in a Non-Synaesthetic Population The present study is a continuation of previous investigations into the nature of sound—colour associations in a non-synaesthetic population conducted on English and Polish vowel sound systems and it aims at providing further evidence for the non-arbitrary nature of cross-modal mappings. The experiment 1 was run on a specially designed computer program and involved 90 participants who were asked to match randomised auditory stimuli (12 English vowel sounds recorded in 2 conditions: in isolation and in a CVC context) with one of 11 basic colours (red, yellow, green, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, black, white and grey) presented as coloured rectangles on a computer screen. The program kept record of the colour choice and reaction time of the participants, who fell into 2 groups with respect to the level of their language proficiency and phonetic awareness. An analysis of the results revealed statistically significant interactions between specific colours and individual vowel sounds for all 12 English vowels examined in the combined analysis; for 10 vowels in Condition 1 (isolated auditory stimuli) and for 7 vowels in Condition 2 (stimuli in the CVC context). A group effect was not found to be significant as far as the quality of mappings was concerned; however, in the case of reaction times the less advanced learners took significantly longer to assign colours to sounds in context. The findings indicate that vowel—sound mappings in non-synaesthetic perception appear non-arbitrary and follow the general tendencies in which bright colours (yellow, green) are associated with high front vowel sounds, whereas dark colours (brown, blue, black) are attributed to back vowels, while open sounds tend to be perceived as red and central vowels are mapped onto achromatic grey.