Volume 58, Issue 4

This paper investigates the lexicalizations of prototypical basic emotion concepts in Polish. A catalogue of all words denoting basic emotions ( anger , disgust , fear , sadness , surprise , joy ) in Polish has been created to qualitatively and quantitatively explore the lexicalizations and to draw an ethnopsychological profile of Poles. The catalogue contains basic emotion terms and their synonyms in noun, verb, and adjective forms, as well as data pertaining to grammatical gender and word frequency. A quantitative and qualitative exploratory analysis of the catalogued data was conducted to determine which of the six basic emotion concepts are lexicalized most richly and completely, and which types of emotion terms are used most frequently. The results indicate that in Polish emotions are preferentially expressed as nouns, even though they are more frequently lexicalized as adjectives. There are also more words for negative emotions than for positive ones (negative differentiation effect), though the positive emotion words are used more frequently than all the negative words combined (Pollyanna effect). Polish also shows a marked preference for overtly verbalizing the neutral emotion of surprise – the smallest category by number of words denoting the emotion. Implications of the results for psychotherapy and bilingualism studies are discussed.

This article contrasts existential constructions in English and Chinese in terms of semantic variability and dimensions of semantic variation, distribution of Definiteness Effect and existentiality on the basis of corpus instances and their contextual features. Exploratory and confirmatory analyses show that: (1) existential construction in English varies more widely than its Chinese counterpart; (2) existential constructions in English and Chinese differ in covert/overt expression of background information, semantics of the existential verb and the noun phrase (NP) whose existence is asserted as well as an interaction between presence of a coda and NP definiteness. Contextual features such as semantics, number, quantification and modifier of NP and covert/overt expression of background information are found to have a significant effect on the distribution of Definiteness Effect. The survey on existentiality indicates that the concept has multiple manifestations in form. Reasons for these linguistic phenomena are discussed from various perspectives.

At the discourse level, personal pronouns have been acknowledged as one of the most important features used to express writer visibility – involvement of the author in the text. Studies have shown that writer visibility depends on discourse type, cultural conventions, writer’s L1, etc. (Petch-Tyson 1998; Ädel 2001; Rodríguez, Vázquez and Guzmán 2011; Zolotova 2014). This paper investigates the discourse function of personal pronouns in argumentative writing in the Croatian language, a Slavic pro-drop language. For the purpose of this paper argumentative essays written by Croatian native speakers (N=100) are analysed for the frequencies of 1st and 2nd person personal pronouns and their discourse functions. The results confirmed low frequency of 1st and 2nd person personal pronouns in the corpus, with the dominance of the 1st person singular personal pronoun I . The qualitative analysis shows that the pronoun I is most frequently used to express discourse functions of writer’s stance and writer’s experience, whereas all of the other pronouns were used mostly to express more general claims. The obtained results gave more insight into the use of personal pronouns in a pro-drop language and confirm cultural and linguistic influences on argumentative writing in the first language.

The Suzhounese polar question exhibits intervention effects, manifested by the linearity constraint barring anti-topical expressions against c-commanding the polar particle. This paper proposes to derive the intervention pattern from two assumptions. Namely, the polar operator is interpreted higher than the C-domain Q operator, and topics project a secondary illocutionary act independently of the primary act associated with the comment. I further show that the Suzhounese pattern is linked to linearity constraints elsewhere (e.g. in why -adjuncts) that crucially draw upon the exceptional wide scope of topics. I point out that the connections I have drawn motivate a novel class of scope effect that is distinct from the better understood focus-induced intervention.

In an eye-tracking during reading experiment we investigated the processing of ambiguous Polish imperfective verbs in contexts with disambiguating (‘frequently’ and ‘yesterday’) and neutral preceding adverbs. Grammatical number of NP objects was also manipulated. Verb regions received significantly longer regression path times when following a neutral compared to 'yesterday' contexts. This implies that in neutral contexts both senses of polysemous imperfective verbs are activated on the verbal region. Post-hoc analyses revealed more regressions from singular objects in neutral contexts, suggesting that a preference for a more frequent plural event sense was created before the first fixations on the object were made. Finally, we observed an effect consisting of longer first pass times on singular objects and more regressions from the following region in contexts with ‘frequently’, which is consistent with the view that imperfective aspect is underspecified for number. This pattern of results is compatible with Relevance Theory, which posits that the selection of one sense (single ongoing or plural) is an outcome of an inferential process based on frequency, context and world knowledge. However, the fact that sense frequency plays a role in this process indicates that it serves as input to context-based inferential processes suggesting that this information is pre-stored in the memory.

This study investigates the sociolinguistics of contemporary Chinese calligraphic works of an ancient poem titled “Xiangjianhuan”. It probes how multiple voices, with various degrees of agency of creativity (that is, the freedom and space allowed for the creative actions), coexist, conflate and contest with each other in the poem itself and the textual-artistic representations of the poem. It relates these multiple voices with different kinds of contesting and conflicting identities manifested through the multimodal resources of the text art. Through the analysis, this study is hoped to shed light on the (socio)linguistic study of Chinese poetry calligraphy as a form of text art in relation to literary creativity and identity work.

This article discusses phonological generalisations concerning Podhale Goralian, a dialect of Polish spoken in southern Lesser Poland. It is argued that Podhale Goralian has a process called Final Tensing, which changes ɔ → o before word-final voiced consonants and glides. Final Tensing interacts with other rules of the dialect, leading to both major types of opacity: underapplication and overapplication. The descriptive generalisations are first stated in terms of rules and then reanalysed in terms of OT constraints. Even though both frameworks deliver the correct results, it is argued that the OT-based analysis is by a small margin superior to the rule-based analysis. Furthermore, the sources of the opacity exhibited by the discussed processes are classified according to Baković’s (2007, 2011) revised typology of opacity. I am particularly grateful to Jerzy Rubach for his discussion, guidance and support. I would also like to thank Jakub Dunin-Borkowski and Grzegorz Lara, who read an earlier version of this paper and provided inspiring feedback. My gratitude goes also to the three PSiCL referees for their helpful criticism, which led to considerable improvement of both the content and the presentation of my analysis. Last but not least, I have a special debt of gratitude to my native speaker consultants for their help and patience: Józef Bąk, Andrzej Kamiński, Stanisław Kamiński, Józef Kula, Anna Łuszczek, Małgorzata Łuszczek, Wojciech Łuszczek, Dorota Pająk, Martyna Pająk, Tomasz Płaza, Leszek Stasiwolak, Katarzyna Szwajnos, Maria Szwajnos, Monika Szwajnos and Andrzej Zarycki. Needless to say, the responsibility for this article is solely mine.

The linguistic properties of the three most common verbs of posture, which express positions, such as zuò ‘sit’, zhàn ‘stand’, tǎng ‘lie’ have been thoroughly studied in a wide range of languages belonging to typologically different language families, but they have never been extensively investigated in Chinese. Our article traces the diachrony of these verbs from the Archaic Chinese period (5th - 2nd centuries BCE, corresponding to the Classical Chinese by excellence) to the present-day Chinese, showing that they have very rarely been grammaticalized into aspect markers, as has been the case in other languages. We also examine the semantic distinction between the expression of a dynamic vs. static action, as well as the syntactic behavior of these positional verbs. We finally discuss their links with locative / existential verbs from the Early Medieval Chinese onwards (3rd c. CE) and the grammaticalization path that has been hypothesized according to which the posture verbs have been first reanalyzed into locative/existential verbs before being grammaticalized into aspectual markers will be tested.

Fragment questions (henceforth FQs) in Mandarin Chinese usually end up with the particle ne . In the literature (e.g. Wei 2013, 2016, 2018), Chinese ne is construed as functioning similarly to Koeran particle -yo and Chinese FQs are analyzed as a fronting-ellipsis phenomenon. Within the framework of Dynamic Syntax (Kempson et al. 2001; Cann et al. 2005), a parsing-based account of Chinese FQs is proposed, showing that (i) ne in Chinese FQs will trigger the REGENERATION process to re-use a macro of actions stored in the previous context; (ii) Semantically, Chinese FQs are often employed as queries about another relatively separate event in connection with the previous one; pragmatically, FQs shows speakers’ interest towards additional information.