Volume 49, Issue 2

This study investigated the relationship between thought, emotion, and language in the case of empathy and distress within C.D. Batson’s Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis. The main hypothesis was that there would be significant differences in how emotion terms for empathy and distress would be processed by participants differentially conditioned to feel either empathy or distress. The secondary hypothesis was that only the emotion terms with high corpus frequency, high measures of familiarity within target population, and with manifest affective meaning component would differ significantly between the experimental conditions. The main hypothesis was partially confirmed. It was found that participants in the empathy condition processed distress terms with more accuracy and speed than they did empathy terms. Furthermore the rates of overall accuracy were significantly higher in the empathy condition than in the distress condition. The secondary hypothesis was confirmed. Items ranking high in frequency and familiarity, as well as conveying a clearly defined affective meaning component were processed significantly more accurately than the low-frequency, low-familiarity, not manifestly affective terms. The overall conclusions indicate that many contextual factors including both the external reality and the internal mental context influence the choice of emotion terms for specific feelings.

The goals of this article are manifold. Firstly, it sets out to investigate the relatively un-explored object control, transitive out of -ing complementation pattern of verbs in contemporary spoken American English, as evidenced in the COCA corpus. To this end, the quantitative analysis aimed at both establishing the frequency of the pattern and extracting any innovative matrix verbs selecting the pattern. The major criteria for assessing innovation were both Rudanko’s (2011) study and the standard work of reference, i.e. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The subsequent goal of the study constituted an attempt at taxonomising the innovative matrix verbs both in respect of their semantics and predicate–argument structure in order to discern any possible correlations between the semantics and/or syntax of the verbs and their potential for selecting the transitive out of -ing pattern. The final objective of the study was to verify the applicability of the theoretical framework adopted, i.e. Goldbergian construction grammar (Goldberg 1995), whereby grammatical constructions do convey meaning, irrespective of the words used in them, with the transitive out of -ing pattern instantiating a type of a caused motion construction. The rationale behind the choice of the pattern was to redress the balance in the treatment of the transitive out of -ing complementation pattern, “[a] pattern which has often been neglected in work on complementation” (Rudanko 2011: 87).

The main aim of the research was to investigate the construct validity of L2 speaking proficiency in a paired testing format. 100 secondary school students and university students were recruited for the study (m=24, f=76), with a mean age of M=18.67. The par-ticipants were tested in pairs (compare-and-contrast task) by two independent raters on four trait categories: accuracy (A), fluency (F), word choice (WC) and turn taking (TT), on a pre-specified 6-point scale. The inter-rater reliability was computed using two approaches (Pearson’s Product Moment correlation and Cronbach’s alpha), and they both indicated the ratings were reliable. The average scores on the scale and subscales also showed high values of Cronbach’s alpha, which confirmed the reliability of the measurement instruments as well. In order to examine the construct of the participants’ speaking performance, we performed exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. The final model, with very good fit indices, confirmed the initial hypothesis: the construct of L2 oral proficiency is comprised of all four assumed trait factors; however, the strength of correlations rather suggests that there are two facets of the said construct (linguistic: A, F, WC and sociolinguistic: TT).

In this paper, I reconsider the nature of sam (a Polish counterpart to Russian and Serbo-Croatian sam , German selbst , Italian solo , Danish selv ), a lexical item generally assumed to be adjectival. First, I focus on its use as an adnominal intensifier and argue that in this function it should be considered pronominal. Since intensifying sam has a history of appearing in analyses propagating the DP Hypothesis, my proposal sheds some light on these issues and leads to bigger questions concerning the structure of Polish nominals, in particular whether they project DP or not. Answers to these questions constitute the second part of the paper, where I argue that D equals Person (hence DP/PersonP) and that it is universally present in Polish nominals. I draw on the evidence from Left Branch Extractions and adjunct extractions and show that, while such extractions are quite freely available in Polish, they are nevertheless blocked whenever in the presence of overt D/Person heads, just like in languages with articles, projecting DP. I further show that the difference between Polish and English with respect to adjectival LBE reduces to the employment of distinct case-checking strategies and agreement options.

Strict alphabetical ordering of lemmata in a dictionary may be interrupted by the nesting of derivatives as run-ons at the end of the entry for the lemma. This practice can also be found in most monolingual dictionaries. The focus of this article is, therefore, on the presentation of word-formations, or more precisely on adverbs. For the purpose of our research, a database was compiled consisting of all the adverbs regardless of their status that can be found in OALD8 in random stretches from the letters C and S. One hundred and twenty-eight adverbs included in OALD8 were then checked in LDOCE5, MED2, CALD3 and COBUILD5 to see whether the same adverbs are also dealt with in these dictionaries and to establish the similarities and differences in the treatment of these adverbs in all five dictionaries. As is evident from the results, less than half the adverbs are included as entries, the others being undefined run-ons. The latter are hidden within the microstructure and consequently more difficult to spot, which means that the dictionary user must either be trained in dictionary use or retrieve this information from the front matter of the dictionary s/he is using.