Volume 47, Issue 3

Speaking English with inappropriate intonation, which can impede communication and cause misunderstandings, is a characteristic of the speech of many university English majors in Vietnam. A study was carried out using participant action research, with the aim of improving Vietnamese learners’ intonation. The participants were fourteen second-year English major volunteers from a university in Vietnam. The study was implemented in two cycles of 12 two-part sessions, including one-hour group discussions and 90-minute sessions devoted to intonation learning strategies. The data include journals written by participants after each session; 30-minute interviews done at the beginning of the study; and recordings for pre- and post-tests. The Praat program was used for analysing intonation contours. Two native speaking judges rated learners’ ability to recognize and produce three tones (rising, falling, falling-rising), tonic syllables and intonation patterns to express their intended ideas. The results of the tests showed that the students’ intonation improved by approximately 30 percent. Qualitative data from the learners’ journals and the discussion sessions indicated that participants had learned to employ learning strategies. The two most popular strategies were to practise naturalistically (particularly, shadow talking) and to represent tones in memory. The study demonstrated that certain learning strategies can be developed to enhance the learning of intonation.

Research has shown that spoken languages differ from each other in their representation of space. Using hands, body, and physical space in front of signers to represent space, do sign languages differ from each other? To what extent are they similar to spoken languages in their expressions of spatial relations? The present study targeted these questions by exploring the descriptions of static situations in sign languages (Turkish Sign Language, Croatian Sign Language, American Sign Language) and spoken languages, including co-speech gestures (Turkish, Croatian, and English). It is found that signed and spoken languages differ from each other in their linguistic constructions for the left/right and front/back spatial relation. They also differ from one another in their mapping strategies. Crucially, being a signer does not require more direct iconic mappings than a speaker would use. It is also found that co-speech gestures can complement spoken language descriptions.

Gesture communication, like prosody and paralinguistic voice features, strikes the attention when there is too little of it, too much of it, or when it does not seem to fit the words or the situation. The present study follows the principle that gesture is similar to some aspects of speech, particularly prosody and parts of the lexicon. Description of visual gesture articulation is therefore treated as a conservative extension of descriptions of vocal speech gesture articulation. Well-tried models of speech forms and functions are deployed, together with accounts from gesture studies from psychology to robotics. Evidence is taken from video data of story-telling in Ega, an African language, and in German, and the adequacy of descriptive and computational models of the forms and functions of speech is discussed, with a proposal for the formal modelling of speech-like timing of gesture articulators by means of Time Types in the Linear-Feature-Timing-Realtime (LFTR) model. Finally, an integrative model for combining visual and vocal gesture articulations into a comprehensive functional model of multimodal communication is proposed: the Rank Interpretation Model (RIM).

This paper presents the results of a study that analyzes antonym co-occurrence in written texts in a corpus of contemporary Serbian language. It adopts the metalexical approach to paradigmatic semantic relations, which posits that semantic relations among words are represented as part of what we know about the words. Antonymy is within this theoretical framework viewed as a conceptual relation, derivable by a single relational principle. Contexts of antonym use in the sentence seem to be structured and can be explained if conceptual approach to antonymy is adopted. Two major, and four minor, functions of antonyms have been identified in discourse, matching the results of similar analyses in other languages, such as English, Japanese, Swedish and Dutch. Antonyms in Serbian written discourse are predominantly used with an aim to either maximize contrast or annul its existence. This “paradox” can be explained if we postulate that antonyms are minimally different (i.e. similar but for one relevant difference) which makes it possible for the language users to focus on either of these two properties when they use them in discourse. This paper describes the notion of antonymous framework and the roles that antonyms can have in these phrasal contexts. The conclusions provide support to conceptual approach to antonymy and contribute to investigations of antonyms from pragmatic perspective using corpus data.

This paper argues for a semantic account of ungrammatical extractions from ob(‘whether’)-complement clauses in German. Relying on Partition Semantics for a se-mantic characterisation of wh-questions (cf. e.g. Groenendijk and Stokhof 1984) and the concept of index dependency of propositions denoted by [+wh]-complement clauses (cf. Groenendijk and Stokhof 1982), it is argued that the ungrammatical extraction constructions are “defective” on logico-semantic grounds as they can get an interpretation under which no alternative answer opened up by the question can be excluded. By relying on e.g. Fox and Hackl’s (2006) assumptions on contextual blindness (the term being used by Magri 2009), the semantic violation is treated as a constraint that can only be circumvented by evoking contextually invariable means. It is argued that the latter aspect can manifest itself in the occurrence of resumptive pronouns in the extraction domain.

This paper discusses V features, nominative case checking, and V movement in Chomsky’s (1995, 2001) minimalist program, explains the facets of the English subjunctive and imperative, and contrasts the difference of V movement between English and Polish. I propose the V feature specifications [−Tense, +Agr] and [+Tense, −Agr] for the English subjunctive and imperative respectively. Under this analysis, the auxiliary do can be solely inserted into [+Tense], which is an independent case checker, while [+Agr] is a dependent case checker which must be activated by another head under adjacent head-to-head relation (Raposo 1987). It is further illustrated that the finite V carries [+Tense, +Agr] in English, but [+Tense, +Agr, +Mood] for earlier English and other European languages such as Polish. The claim is that the diachronic change of V movement should not be attributed to any impoverishment of agreement morphology, but to the demise of mood morphology, and that V raising can be accounted for in terms of the strength of I by counting the number of positive features: The more, the stronger. The peculiar behavior of by plus an agreement suffix in Polish subjunctives can also be explained by setting up MoodP which hosts [+Agr, +Mood] in its head.

The study investigates sound symbolism, concentrating on vowel quality, duration, and pitch in sound-to-size correspondences. Thirty-one native speakers of Polish were asked to rate presented stimuli on a 1–7 point scale ranging from “small” to “big”. The stimuli consisted of /CVC/ sequences, with all six non-nasalized Polish vowels, blocked in three groups. In the first group, vowel quality was investigated, with duration and pitch unaltered. In the second group, vowel was manipulated to increase its duration by 50% relative to a baseline condition. In the third group, F0 of a vowel was linearly downshifted by a scaling factor of 0.8. The results revealed that neither vowel quality nor lowered pitch significantly influenced size ratings. Vowel duration, however, yielded significantly different ratings compared to a baseline condition. Longer durational values yielded “bigger” measures relative to normal duration. This result is taken as evidence that vowel duration has a relatively more robust effect on perception of size in Polish compared to vowel quality and pitch.

The article focuses on the retrieval of information on the basis of part-of-speech labeling. When studying the inclusion of individual words, senses and phraseological units in five British monolingual learners’ dictionaries (OALD8, LDOCE5, COBUILD5, CALD3, MED2), it was found that the dictionaries under investigation do not always agree on a PoS label or that lemmata are equipped with more than one PoS label. Special attention is paid to locating words, senses and phraseological units where it is essential to identify the correct part of speech of the word under which they are included and dealt with in monolingual learners’ dictionaries. Without a shadow of a doubt, the problem of PoS labeling has been partly resolved by the introduction of multiple PoS labels; consequently, the user no longer needs to identify each and every part of speech of the word in question. Another simplification of the microstructure regarding the inclusion of phraseological units is that all phraseological units with one common element belonging to different parts of speech are simply grouped together in one special idioms section without distinction between individual parts of speech.

Review of Brandão de Carvalho, Joaquim, Tobias Scheer and Philippe Ségéral (eds.). 2008. Lenition and fortition.