Volume 51, Issue 3

Prosodic words in Turkish are generated according to the palatal and labial Vowel Harmony (VH) rules: being left-to-right iterative, (1) any suffix vowel agrees with the preceding vowel with the [back] feature and (2) a high vowel agrees with the preceding vowel with the [round] feature. However, bare forms, compounds, affixes of foreign origin, some derivational morphemes, semi-copulas, imperfective, and complementizers violate the rules forming exceptional cases. Considering these exceptions, do Turkish speakers apply VH rules to affixes including 28 disharmonic affixes attached to newly formed or borrowed words? Aiming to answer this question, this paper reports on two experimental linguistic studies which are the first experimental studies on this topic: acceptability judgments with a Likert scale, consisting of a repeated measures within-subjects design, and a forced choice questionnaire. Participants judged words with suffixes, i.e., eight suffixes (harmonic: -DI, -mAlI,-lAr, -lIk and disharmonic: -lejin, -Ijor, -gil, -Ebil) attached to nonsense words (also nonwords) with a common Turkish CVC syllable structure. Results showed that when it comes to nonsense words, regardless of exceptions, Turkish speakers preferred suffixes that undergo VH harmony more than those which do not, and prefer harmonization more than disharmony.

This paper highlights certain semantic similarities and differences between the descriptive adjective "debeo, -la, -lo" in Serbian and its English equivalent "fat". A multi-faceted approach is used to perform a collocational and componential analysis of the collocates extracted from various corpora. A contrastive analysis is also undertaken. Furthermore, a specific emphasis is placed on the presence of grammatical gender in Serbian, and the lack of such gender in English. Thus, the results of the analysis illustrate how the semantic (and grammatical) aspects of these adjectives in the two languages are reflected in the use of the words and how they collocate. In addition, the collocational framework of the adjective "debeo, -la, -lo" in Serbian was found to change, based both on the grammatical gender (masculine, feminine, neuter), and also on the sequence of its near synonyms. The same changes were not found in English which lacks grammatical gender. The paper uses electronic databases and corpora to analyse the frequency of the collocations found for the selected adjectives in both languages. The results suggest that there are distinct idiomatic meanings to the analysed adjectives in both Serbian and English.

Despite the vast body of research on the linguistic peculiarities of Instant Messaging and Short Messaging Service, little is known about the language used in Mobile Instant Messaging in a cross-generational and cross-cultural context. To fill this gap, the crosslinguistic study addressed here is an attempt to approach age-specific variation from a blended ethnography approach. The current research is grounded on an analysis of a naturally-occurring dataset of WhatsApp messages from the point of view of oralisation and deviations from standard forms. Two distinct generations of English and Spanish texters provide empirical data on the parameters of the oralised written discourse suggested by Yus (2011): emoticons, orthographic mistakes, phonetic orthography, abbreviations, acronyms and clippings, and the use of words in other languages. Subsequently, an analysis of the interviews held with the writers approaches the factors that may determine language variation in the messages. The conclusions drawn highlight the persistent use of deviations from standard language of English and Spanish teenagers. The study confirms a higher frequency of a conversational style in Spanish than in English. Not only brevity and speed reasons but also familiarity, playfulness and intimacy with the addressee are behind the intentional variations used.

The major objective of this article is to discuss the status of nominal projections in Polish within the phase theory, with a special reference to the Phase Impenetrability Condition (PIC) (Chomsky 2000, 2001). Throughout the paper, it is argued that certain case marking properties internal to Polish QPs showing the Genitive of Quantification in particular, indicate that they do not observe the PIC in that the NP-complement domain to Q in [QP Q [NP]] is still available for operations of narrow syntax at the derivational stage when the verbal projection is formed. In consequence, the transfer of the NP-complement domain to Q to PF/LF is delayed. Moreover, an attempt is made to show, on the basis of binding facts and extraction, that internal structure of Polish nominals including possessives does not exactly follow the proposals made in Bošković (2005, 2009, 2013, 2014) for analogous Serbo-Croatian cases. Instead, it is proposed that Polish nominals feature a more complex architecture typical of a subclass of SC nominals, namely higher numerals. Crucially, Polish nominals are more complex than an NP with multiple levels of adjunction.

This paper explores the relation between familiarity of Chinese subjects and the syntactic distance. We propose two hypotheses: (1) contextually given Mandarin Chinese subjects are more likely to be used with long intervening adverbials than contextually new subjects; and (2) subjects with higher word frequency are more likely to be followed by long adverbials than those with lower word frequency. The data from two Mandarin Chinese treebanks provide supportive evidence for the first hypothesis, but not the second. Cognitively, this is probably due to the possibility that contextual givenness, which reflects familiarity, may lessen the effect of locality by increasing the activation level (the accessibility) of the subject and rendering these subjects less susceptible to the memory decay caused by the adverbials intervening between them and the predicate verbs. Subjects are usually the starting point of a sentence, which has a default given–new information structure. Therefore, when organizing a sentence, we are dominantly concerned with the information status (contextual givenness) relative to previous context when choosing the subjects, which may partly accounts for the observed irrelevance between word frequency and the use of adverbials. A sentence is structured based on the information status of the subjects, not their word frequency.