Volume 50, Issue 4

The paper reports the results of a study investigating vowel reduction in the speech of non-native speakers of English. The aim was to unravel the links between reduction and speech rate, phonetic training and gender. We hypothesized that (i) Polish speakers of English reduce vowels; (ii) they speak slower than native speakers; (iii) the higher the rate, the higher the reduction degree; (iv) speakers with phonetic training reduce less than those lacking it; (v) male subjects reduce more than the female ones. In order to realize these aims, an acoustic analysis of vowels was performed on 2 hrs 42 mins of speech produced by 12 Polish speakers of English. The subjects were di-vided into an experimental group consisting of 6 students of English and a control group with 6 speakers who had no phonetic training. The obtained results positively verify that non-native speakers reduce vowels and cast some doubts on whether they speak slower than native speakers. The role of rate and gender could not be established due to statistical and methodological issues. The group with no phonetic training outperformed the group which underwent phonetic training, pointing instead to the role of exposure and perhaps music training in acquiring native-like reduction patterns.

Modularity of grammar has been explicitly or tacitly assumed in many generative analyses. Modules are separate computational systems that perform specific tasks and make use of domain-specific information. It is argued that the concept is difficult to maintain in the light of evidence from Polish. I look at palatalization effects before vowels and conclude that phonological regularities must have access to morphosyntactic information. In addition, certain regularities in the selection of diminutive allomorphs suggest that morphology must have access to phonetic information. As domain specificity, the core concept of modular approaches, is compromised, modularity does not seem a likely candidate for a universal property of grammar.

This article is a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic comparison of three interrelated emotional categories of shame, embarrassment and guilt in two different cultural settings of individualistic societies, as represented here by Britain and America, and a collectivist society, such as Poland. The conceptual field of SHAME is operationalized through its three near-synonymous adjectival exponents, "ashamed"/"zawstydzony", "embarrassed"/"zażenowany", and "guilty"/"winny". Drawing on relevant research in social and cognitive psychology as well as linguistics, the present study applies advanced quantitative corpus-based methodology to reconstruct the cultural and conceptual profiles of the three emotions.

Based on the written part of the British Component of International Corpus of English (ICE-GB), this paper investigates the interrelationship between length and complexity of sentential constituents and their positions in the sentence. Results show that length and complexity affect sentential constituent ordering. Within the sentence, the longest and the most complex constituents tend to occur in the final position, and the relatively shorter and less complex constituents tend to be in the initial position. However, for sentential constituents in other positions, the length-complexity-position relationship appears to be random. Possible explanations for the findings are provided from different perspectives, especially from the distribution of given and new information.

The study reproduces pilot work concerned with the imitation of English vowel duration by Polish learners (Zając 2013). Its aim was to expand on the findings of the previous study, i.e. determine if the magnitude of imitation may depend on the native/non-native status of the model talker and investigate whether the provision of explicit instructions to imitate at the beginning of the experiment affects convergence strategies of the participants. The dependent variable was the duration of three English front vowels analysed in shortening and lengthening contexts. The stimuli included pre-recorded English word pairs pronounced by a native and a non-native model talker. The experimental procedure consisted of three tasks: (1) reading the English word pairs displayed sequentially on a computer screen (baseline condition), producing the English words after exposure to (2) the native model talker’s voice and (3) the non-native model talker’s voice (shadowing conditions). The results show that the magnitude of imitation in the pronunciation of L2 learners may differ as a function of the model talker (native vs. non-native). The provision of explicit instructions to imitate at the beginning of the experimental procedure was found not to have a significant impact on the convergence strategies of the subjects.