Volume 52, Issue 3

The study revisits the concept of code-switching (CS) by focusing on a phenomenon in which bilinguals reverse switch from their L1 to L2 while speaking in their mother tongue. In the opening sections, the basic question of why CS occurs is addressed by reviewing relevant research and by looking beyond the formal interests to the social and cultural functions of CS in bilingual interactions. Then in the last two chapters, the study introduces and highlights a version of CS called reverse code-switching which is, to a large extent and despite its frequency of occurrence in outer circle societies, ignored in language studies. Attempt has been made to survey possible psycholinguistic and sociocultural explanations that may account for and common perceptions which are held towards the latter phenomenon in the light of the former.

Research articles have often materialized through the use of impersonal objective strategies viz. abstract rhetors, passive constructions, and nominalizations. However, intrusive or subjective strategies, such as self-mentions, appear to integrate impersonal structures. As a rhetorical strategy to explicitly portray authorial selves, self-mentions help writers to project themselves into the discourse by marketing themselves and demarcating their original contribution to the field. Here, an interdisciplinary approach was adopted to examine explicit authorial presence in a comparable corpus of 40 research articles in applied linguistics, psychology, environmental engineering, and chemistry by taking into consideration: (i) the frequency of using exclusive first person plural pronouns ( we , our , us , and ours ); and (ii) the writers’ rhetorical functions of pronoun use. The results showed that there are interdisciplinary variations in the frequency and use of self-reference, particularly once the soft disciplines are set against the hard ones. The differing results across the datasets reflect the susceptibility of authorial presence to the rhetorical cultures conditioned by the discipline to which the writers belong. The current results are expected to broaden our understanding of disciplinary variations towards self-mentions usage in academic writings in the four communities, particularly in the under-researched disciplines of environmental engineering and chemistry.

Over recent years a great deal of attention has been paid to the influence of social variables on the usage of subject personal pronouns (SPP) in South and Central America as well as in immigrant communities in the USA (Avila-Jiménez 1996; Bayley and Pease-Álvarez 1997; Flores-Ferrán 2004; Labov 1963; Labov 1972; Otheguy and Lapidus 2005a; Otheguy, Zentella and Livert 2007; Silva Corvalán 1994); however, sociolinguistic research on the variable use of SPPs in Turkish communities living in the USA remains scarce. The present study examines the effect of several social variables on the usage of SPPs in the speech of 20 Turkish speakers living in New York City (NYC) and 20 in Turkey. The sample consisted of speakers who were between the ages of 20 and 80. Data analysis involved independent samples t-test, Anovas and linear regression analyses of social variables. The social variables that were analyzed were residence, gender, social class, age, age of arrival in NYC, length of residence in NYC and so forth. The results showed that residence, age of arrival, age and Turkish spoken with a father were the significant variables. The results are discussed with respect to language contact influence from English on Turkish.

Cross-linguistic research in the field of word-formation (WF) is more or less an untilled area. The main goal of this paper is to compare WF systems in Slavic languages, to analyse and evaluate their nature by comparing WF processes and types in Slavic languages as a whole as well as in individual languages of the Slavic genus. The basis for the comparison is the parameter of saturation value which indicates the structural richness of WF systems in terms of synchronically productive processes. This parameter facilitates cross-linguistic comparison at different levels of generalization, in particular: (i) intra-language level – comparison of the relative contribution of individual WF processes within one language; (ii) inter-language level (a) – comparison of the role of selected WF processes in various languages; inter-language level (b) – comparison of WF systems of various languages; (iii) supra-language level – comparison of WF in various language genera; language families and/or areas (Sprachbunds). The most typical features of compounding, affixation and conversion in Slavic languages are highlighted and illustrated with examples. The method applied to the analysis of word-formation processes is the semasiological method. The results, summarized in tables, make it possible to identify prototypical features of word-formation in Slavic languages.

This paper presents an acoustic description of the nine Azerbaijani vowels; investigating the underlying acoustic and temporal characteristics of its vowel system. We explored acoustic and temporal parameters including: the first three formants (F1, F2 and F3), fundamental frequency (F0) and duration of the vowels. Participants in this study were 20 male and 23 female Azerbaijani speakers with a Tabrizi dialect. They were asked to utter three repetitions of the nine Azerbaijani vowels in three natural word contexts, embedded in carrier sentences. Results showed that the [ɯ] and [œ] vowels had a large overlap in the F1–F2 vowel space. Further analysis suggested that F3 is an important cue in discrimination of this vowel pair. Vowel-intrinsic duration effect seemed to be relatively strong in Azerbaijani. Other universal features also were found in the production of Azerbaijani vowels: low vowels and female speakers had lower F0 values. Surprisingly, in contrast with previous results for most languages, the average duration of Azerbaijani vowels was greater in males than females. The results of this study define the acoustic vowel-space of the Azerbaijani language and develop a database for further comparisons and investigations.

The development of prosodic competence in children is a complex process. Various, often conflicting developmental paths have been proposed in the literature, with both the general testing method and language specific factors seeming to be responsible for the variety of the outcomes. In the present study receptive prosodic skills of over 100 Polish children aged 3;6–11 were assessed and compared to the skills of young adults (20–30) in three tasks; emotion recognition of single word utterances, question vs. statement distinction, and synthetic vs. recorded human voice discrimination. No age effect was found in the emotion recognition task; the question vs. statement distinction ability had a clear developmental threshold at the age between 7 and 8, and the ability to spot rhythmic and temporal distortions of synthetic speech gradually improved with age, but was generally not developed in 3;6 to 5;6 year olds. The results suggest a complex path of acquisition of the above skills.

The thing is is variously used in present-day English, which can be taken as different stages involved in its evolution. The discourse marker ( the ) thing is may be derived from the matrix clause the X thing is and the construction seems to have undergone both syntactic and semantic changes characteristic of grammaticalization. It is decategorialized in the sense that it is downgraded to a parenthetical. It is also desemanticized, since it loses its concrete information content and assumes a more abstract meaning, expressing the speaker’s emphasis of the importance of the following proposition. Moreover, the discourse marker functions can be seen as the extensions from the core function of intensification, since the degree of intensification gradually weakens and the inferences become generalized and conventionalized in frequent use.