Volume 53, Issue 2

There are issues concerning the bilingual development of a marked consonant in the literature that need to be clarified. While it is known that input frequency has a facilitative effect on monolingual development, its effects on bilingual development are not clear. Here, a child’s dense, longitudinal speech data from age 2;7 to 3;11 are examined in order to study the bilingual development of a marked consonant, theta , in English and Greek. The results address several issues pertaining to monolingual and bilingual development. Theta development in the two languages is parallel: theta word-frequency reflects adult speech; theta vocabulary grows logarithmically; first accurate realizations occur in frequent words independently of their complexity; in contrast, complete acquisition first occurs in words of lower complexity independently of usage frequency; the acquisition level for all words remains at a low plateau level until ages 3;5 and 3;8, followed by a stage of acceleration of the logistic type until complete acquisition, at ages 3;10 and 3;11 for English and Greek, respectively. Because of the presence of two languages, there is a larger and more complex vocabulary across the two languages which facilitates earlier acquisition in the child than in respective monolingual norms.

As human language is a multi-level complex adaptive system, a text can be seen as emergent from the complex interactions between internal and external factors. Text types such as microblog have size restriction, an external variable which may affect relevant quantitative properties of the texts themselves. Such texts provide a good opportunity to investigate the interactions between the external and internal factors of human language from the perspective of complex adaptive system. This study focuses on how the size restriction of Chinese microblog texts affects the length of their sentences and clauses. Quantitative properties concerning sentence and clause length of Chinese microblog texts are analyzed and compared with those of texts with no size restriction (i.e., prose, news report and romantic fiction). Analysis of sentence length distribution shows that size restriction has an impact on sentence length measured by numbers of words and clauses. The correlation between sentence length and clause length is examined with Menzerath-Altmann law. The satisfying fitting result of microblog texts probably suggests that, language units are able to re-organize and re-regulate their structures according to relevant external factors, until they reach a balanced new system.

The paper investigated learner attitudes to two major pronunciation models in EFL instruction at the university level: GB (General British) and GA (General American). It focused on four dimensions that are central to developing language attitudes: affective, linguistic, pragmatic and socio-cultural. Based on a survey conducted among 100 Polish students majoring in English (half of them trained in GB, the other half in GA), the study aimed to establish a hierarchy of these dimensions to determine which of them is/are key to shaping positive attitudes to the target variety. Of additional interest was how the students viewed the alternative pronunciation model. The study also sought to determine the degree of correlation between the aforementioned dimensions. The survey found that both varieties were assessed most favorably on the affective dimension. Overall, as the target variety, GB was rated more positively than GA; however, stronger correlations between the dimensions were observed among the GA learners.

This article discusses phonological generalizations concerning derived imperfectives in Kurpian, a dialect of Polish spoken in northern Mazovia. It is argued that, unlike Standard Polish, Kurpian has a live process that turns lax vowels into tense vowels in derived imperfectives. DI Tensing interacts with other rules of Kurpian, leading, in some cases, to Duke of York derivations. The paper is based 100% on the original fieldwork. A formal analysis of the descriptive generalizations is conducted in the framework of Optimality Theory. I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers of this journal for their help and discussion. The research for this article was supported in part by a University of Warsaw grant from the National Center of Science number 2013/09/B/HS2/01095.

This study is to uncover the persuasive means of inviting or restricting alternative voices in Iranian and American press. About 10,000 engagement tokens were gathered from 216 newspaper opinions/editorials written between 2005 and 2010 on the Iranian nuclear program in two Persian newspapers, Iran and Aftab-e-Yazd , two English newspapers written by Persian writers– Tehran Times and Keyhan International –and two American newspapers written by American writers– New York Times and Washington Post . The Appraisal theory based on “contract” and “expand” linguistic features (Martin and White 2005) was used to compare the lexico-grammar of the engagement tokens. Central to their engagement are the dialogic heterogloss which acknowledges the diversity of voices in discourse and the undialogized monogloss which disregards the diversity. The investigation has revealed that whereas the op/eds written in Persian took the lead in using “endorse” and “counter”, two micro linguistic features of “contract”, (e.g., terms such as although, never , etc.), the American op/eds opted for “entertain” micro linguistic feature of “expand” (e.g., perhaps, argue , etc.). Interestingly, the op/eds written in English by the Persians stood in the middle, between the Americans and those written in Persian. However, when using terms that involve national interest, the latter group echo the Persian writers’ voice.