Volume 56, Issue 4

We analyze the rise and loss of isoglosses in two Indo-European languages, early Greek and early English, which, however, show considerable distance between their structures in many other domains. We follow Keidan’s approach (2013), that has drawn the attention on the fact that the study of isoglosses (i.e., linguistic features common to two or more languages) is connected with common innovations of particular languages after the split into sub-groups of Indo-European: this type of approach aims at collecting isoglosses that appear across the branches of Indo-European. We examine the rise of the isogloss of labile verbs and the loss of the isogloss of the two classes of aspectual verbs in early Greek and early English. Our study shows that the rise of labile verbs in both languages is related to the innovative use of intransitives in causative constructions. On the other hand, the innovations in voice morphology follow different directions in Greek and English and are unrelated to the rise of labile verbs. In contrast to labile verbs, which are still predominant for causative-anticausative constructions in both languages, the two classes of aspectual verbs are lost in the later stages of Greek but are predominant even in Present-day English. Again, a “prerequisite” change for the isogloss can be easily located in a structural ambiguity that is relevant for aspectual verbs in early Greek and early English. However, another independent development, the changes in verbal complementation (the development of infinitival and participial complements) in Greek and English, determined the loss of this isogloss.

Level of proficiency (LoP), unlike other factors, such as L2 status (Cenoz 2001) or linguistic proximity (Westergaard et al. 2016), has not been widely investigated in terms of third language acquisition (TLA). However, it is possible that LoP in L2 (Tremblay 2006), L3 (Wrembel 2010) and the interaction between these factors (Sypiańska and Cal in press) might play an important role in TLA. This study, thus, aims to further examine the aforesaid possibilities by analysing the influence of L2 and L3 LoP and their interaction on the production of L3 vowels in a group of L1 Polish/L2 English/L3 Spanish speakers who differ in terms of LoP in their foreign languages. A MANOVA was conducted to compare the main effects of L2LoP, L3LoP and vowel as well as the interaction effect between these factors on the production of L3 Spanish vowels. The results indicate an influential role of L2LoP and L3LoP and their interaction depending on the vowel being analysed. Low proficiency in one of the languages allowed the other, more proficient one, to impact the production of the L3 Spanish vowels. This interplay of factors expands the understanding of how the L2 and L3 proficiency condition the developing L3.

This study explores the issue of communicative distance between Polish and English; its perception and conceptualization, as a function of self-reflection, are related to individual, socio-cultural and environmental, as well as linguistic factors. The aim of the article is to prove that the communicative distance is different while speaking Polish (L1) and English (L2). It was assumed that on the basis of an interlocutor’s self-reported observation and evaluation of verbal and nonverbal cues, it is possible to prove the existence of communicative distance. The research results revealed that in formal English conversations, distance was perceived as shorter than in formal Polish conversations, but in informal conversations, there were no significant differences. Due to gradual language development and absorption of English words into Polish, the study relies on a retrospective data analysis to find out the possible changes in communicative distance perception. The data was retrieved from a series of two surveys conducted in 2008 (n = 150) and 2016 (n = 150) among Poles who use English as a second language.

The paper describes a method for finding diachronic spelling variants in a corpus that consists of historical and modern Polish texts. The procedure applies the Levenshtein distance and the similarity measure determined with a Word2vec model. The method was applied for both words and sub-word units. A sample of spelling variants was manually evaluated and compared against an existing morphological analyser for Polish historical texts. The resulting lists of spelling variants and spelling modernisation rules were used in a text modernisation tool and their contribution was evaluated. The paper also presents an analogous method for finding spelling variants that result from erroneous OCR. The obtained lists of OCR variants and rules may serve for the correction of OCR output.

The aim of this study is to investigate whether the form of English spoken by Nigerian newscasters enjoys the status of a standard in Nigeria. The study employs a verbal guise test and a questionnaire to measure the attitudes of 137 Nigerian participants towards the variety of English used by Nigerian newscasters. The findings show that an exonormative orientation is still present in Nigeria: both British and American English accents are preferred over a Nigerian one for Nigerian newscasters, and a British accent is perceived to be more prevalent than a Nigerian one in Nigerian newscasting. However, the results of the verbal guise test demonstrate that there are very positive attitudes towards all Nigerian newscasters’ accents. The results also show that neither gender nor a stay abroad has a significant effect on Nigerians’ attitudes towards newscasters’ English, but that the age group of the participants significantly influences their evaluations: the older participants rated the newscasters’ English accents higher than the younger ones. Overall, the findings of the study suggest a limited potential of Nigerian newscasters’ English becoming a model of English in Nigeria, as British English as an exonormative norm seems to continue to play a major role.

This paper explores the semantic motivation of English phrasal verbs with the particle out whose constituent verb refers to processes and activities performed by or to plants and their prefixed Serbian counterparts with the prefixes iz -, s - and raz -. The cognitive approach to the semantics of phrasal verbs and prefixes is employed, which entails observing their meaning through the notions of conceptualisation, image-schematic structuring and spatial schematisation. It is shown that there is a high degree of correspondence in the concrete and abstract senses of the contrasted English and Serbian lexemes owing to the same spatial configurations which structure the constituent English and Serbian satellites (the particle out and the prefixes iz- , s- and raz- , respectively). Additionally, various conceptual metaphors stemming from the domain of PLANTS, inherent in the constituent verb, play a prominent role in the extension of the phrasal and prefixed verb meaning in both languages. The conclusion underlines the benefits of using the cognitive semantic approach in the contrastive studies of particles and prefixes.

The frequency with which a word appears in the lexicon has implications for its pronunciation. Numerous studies have shown that high-frequency lemma are characterized by more phonetic reduction than lower-frequency lemma. These findings have proven to be particularly useful in the study of homophones where frequency-related reduction processes can give insights into lexical access theories. The majority of research on homophones and frequency effects has focused on heterographic and semantically unrelated homophones (e.g., English time – thyme ) or investigated zero-derived homophones (e.g., English the cut , noun – to cut , verb). Here, zero inflection in German pluralization (e.g., ein Würfel ‘one die’– zwei Würfel ‘two dice’) was investigated to determine if and how frequency effects impact on the acoustic realization of the homophonous singular-plural word pairs. The findings indicate that the number-specified wordforms show acoustic variation related to wordform frequency and the relative frequency of the singular to plural inflected forms. Results differ for durations of wordforms, stem vowels, and final phonemes. Our findings have implications for lexical access theories and can inform about ‘frequency inheritance’ across the singular and plural homophones of the zero-inflected plurals.