Volume 53, Issue 4

The paper provides a corpus-driven analysis of the emotive meanings and pragmatic functions of Polish ‘affectionate’ expletives from Jezu(s)! ‘Jesus!’ which contain diminutive suffixes, e.g. Jezusku ‘Jesus.DIM’ and Jezusieńku ‘Jesus.DIM.DIM’. While affectionate forms of various names, including Jezu(s) , have been frequently discussed in Polish, few studies – if any – have discussed their various uses as expletives in Polish. Because these diminutive forms of expletives (DEs) are used infrequently, this study uses the Internet as corpus by collecting examples from blogs, the microblogging site Twitter, forums, and The National Corpus of Polish (NKJP). It is shown that the force evoked by the expletive Jezu(s) causes the diminutive forms to typically fall on either end of the negative-positive polarity scale; that is, the DEs rarely express neutral force. Rather, they are mainly used to convey strong positive attitude (e.g. appreciation) or negative attitude (e.g. complaint, frustration). Often, the ‘softness’ of the blow and/or degree of positive emotion depends on the diminutive suffix(es) used. This interesting paradox – a lexical item that is a combination of negative expletive force and positive tender diminutives – provides deeper insight into the extent of diminutive and expletive use in contemporary Polish.

Acquisition of adjectives by bilingual Turkish children have been touched upon by Boeschoten (1990), Pfaff (1991), Schmidt (2007), and these studies concluded that “the other language” has an effect on Turkish. Özcan (2013) showed that both age and gender have an effect on the acquisition of adjectives and that 7th grade (around the age of 12–13) is a turning point. Taking the findings of these studies as a starting point, we aimed to draw a developmental profile in the use of adjectives in Turkish in the bilingual setting regarding form (simple vs. derivational or complex), function (predicative vs. attributive), age and gender. The present study was designed as a longitudinal study and the data came from spontaneous conversations of Turkish–Danish bilingual school children between the 1st and 8th grades in order to see the developmental profile. In each grade, two subgroups, a boys-only group and a girls-only group, were included in the analysis in order to reveal any possible gender differences in the data. The data was analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively using the CHILDES database. The results showed that age does not have an effect on the acquisition of adjectives. Gender has only an effect at early ages. However, acquisition of another language has an effect on morphological accuracy and on the developmental profile.

Despite the vast body of research on communication strategies (CSs) and the way L2 learners manage to get their message across via these mechanisms, there is little research on Spanish as L2 in an interactional context and between different types of dyads. This is why this study attempts to examine a possible relationship between Spanish L2 learners’ use of communication strategies and the type of interactant (learner and native speaker). For this, twenty-four face-to-face interactions of two types of dyads carrying out two tasks were analysed by drawing on Dörnyei and Körmos’ taxonomy (1998) and Dörnyei and Scott’s interactional CSs (1997). The data collection involved video and audio recording, observation of participants’ interactions and stimulated recall methodology. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted to investigate a possible association between CSs and the interlocutor factor. Findings confirm an association between the learners’ CS usage and the type of interlocutor as being more influenced by the speakers’ linguistic background and, consequently, the NS’s role as an L2 expert.

There is a widespread criticism of the use of linguists’ introspective judgments as data in syntactic generative research. The critics point to a few major inadequacies of this type of data. First of all, data from introspections are claimed to be unreliable and heavily biased, but also simply irrelevant by not representing real utterances produced in real situations. In view of some critics such inadequacies disqualify linguists’ judgments as legitimate data, other authors concede that they remain a viable source of data but should always be cross-checked by other types of evidence which typically include: corpus data, experimental syntax data, and empirical evidence provided by neuro- and psycholinguistic experimentation. The aims of the paper are: (i) to raise a point in defense of the validity and practical non-substitutability of introspective data in generative research, (ii) to assess the practical utility of the new types of evidence for generativists’ needs. The way to achieve these goals will be by analyzing how a specific research problem ( wh -extractions from embedded indicative clauses in Polish) can be handled with the use of different types of data. The final part will be concerned with the worries and hopes concerning the implementation of the data available from neuro-linguistic experimentation in generative syntactic research.