Volume 58, Issue 1

A comprehensive corpus-driven account of the internal structure, meaning and interpretation of relative clauses in Nigerian Pidgin English (NPE) is missing in the literature. Relativisation, including its process, strategies, constraints, structural patterning, meaning and interpretation, is an important syntactic structure in any language, and therefore is crucial to our understanding of the extent to which syntactic and semantic structures in NPE differ from standard varieties of English. Relying on corpus material extracted from a popular web media outlet BBC News Pidgin, the study shows that user/speakers of NPE are cognitively enabled and creative in varying relative clauses along simple and complex choices and that structural and semantic complexities operative in the relativisation process in NPE are not too different from standard Englishes. Unlike in standard English where relativisers who and which clearly relate to the animacy of the relativised NP, relativiser representing wey , which can be classified as a prototype for relativisers weh , wen , and wia , does not clearly make such distinction. Also, it is shown that wey embodies the syntactic and semantic properties of these other relativisers, a phenomenon classified as relativiser reduction .

This study investigated the role of prevoicing, breathy-voicing, and plain-aspiration in the perception of the voiced-aspirated stop category in Bangla. 31 native speakers of Bangla undertook two different perception experiments where they had to identify what stop category they can hear in forced-choice MCQ tasks. Each experiment presented 25 stimuli (repeated 3 times) that were artificially manipulated; stimuli in Experiment-1 were manipulated for the duration of prevoicing and breathy-interval, while stimuli in Experiment-2 were manipulated for the duration of prevoicing and plain-aspiration. A total of 4650 response tokens were collected in two experiments. Results revealed that a prevoicing interval of about 40ms and a breathy interval of about 20–40 ms are required for the perception of voiced-aspirates. In addition, listeners showed a clear preference for breathy-voicing over plain-aspiration when categorizing sounds as voiced-aspirated stop, indicating that breathy-voicing is perceived to be better associated with voiced-aspirates. Implications for the general phonetics of voiced-aspirates are discussed in the light of the results.

The paper presents an attempt to develop a procedure of researching functional transposition in English. Functional transposition is interpreted as a diachronicsynchronic functional process and its outcome, which presupposes the ability of lexical units, by means of grammaticalization and lexicalization and without application of any morphological and/or syntactical markers, to acquire and realize functions inherent to other word classes. The procedure consists of four major stages which cover the entire process of transposition of each lexical unit from its origin and up to the current use. The main methods include: definition and componential analyses, historical analysis of origin, diachronic corpus analysis, and synchronic corpus analysis. In the present paper, the procedure is verified with a case study of the lexical unit ‘IN’. It has been established that in the case of ‘IN’, functional transposition started from the category of prepositions. The tendency of its development shows that after a gradual decrease and stabilization, observed in Early and Late Modern English, respectively, functional transposition of ‘IN’ has undergone a dramatic increase in Present-Day English. It is explained by formation of new sociocultural situations and institutionalization of numerous patterns of functionally transposed ‘IN’ in the language.

This study examined whether and, if so, how Taiwanese Mandarin speakers’ compliment-responding behaviors are related to their gender and the gender and relative social power of their addressees. The data of the current study were collected from a discourse completion test. Forty-eight Taiwanese Mandarin native speakers participated in this study. The coding scheme encompassed seventeen microstrategies, which were further categorized into four macro-categories, including ACCEPTANCE , AMENDMENT , NONACCEPTANCE , and EVADING . Results showed that the controlled variables were all significant to the participants’ compliment response use. There are also some interactive effects between these variables on the complimentee’s compliment-responding behavior. Different microstrategies were employed to react to the given compliments according to the social expectations on the complimentees in different social positions and of different biological gender identities as well as the complimentees’ psychological perceptions of the given positive remarks. Moreover, the results also found that acceptance-oriented responses had a wider distribution in the present database. This might be attributed to that people in Taiwan nowadays place more emphasis on positive politeness and the value of prioritizing the self rather than the traditional Confucian value of humility.